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Beis ogee oun ome los oa 
Tawney, R. H. 1880-1962. 


Religion and the rise of 
capitalism 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/religionriseofca00tawn_ 2 





RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM 


Ess 
oe | ry 


eS 


j ReRE SD): 





RELIGION 


AND THE 


RISE OF CAPITALISM 


A HISTORICAL STUDY 





(HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922) 


By R. H. TAWNEY 


READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON} 
SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD 


NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 


All rights reserved, inciuding 
the right to reproduce this book 
or portions thereof in any form. 


[f-5-47] 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO 
DR. CHARLES GORE 
WITH 


AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE 





“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not 
much meditated upon God, the human mind, and 
the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving 
earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry 
patriot and a sorry statesman.” 

BrisHop BERKELEY, Siris, 350. 


aoe ae 
Riad Sr 
ri > 





INTRODUCTION 


THE object of this book is to trace some strands in the de- 
velopment of religious thought on social and economic ques- 
tions in the period which saw the transition from medieval 
to modern theories of social organization. It does not carry 
the subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history 
either of economic theory or of economic practice, except in 
so far as theory and practice were related to changes in re- 
ligious opinion. In reality, however, the connection be- 
tween them was intimate and vital. The revolutions, at 
once religious, political and social, which herald the transi- 
tion from the medieval to the modern world, were hardly 
less decisive for the economic character of the new civiliza- 
tion than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious 
doctrines. The economic categories of modern society have 
their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions 
which accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Ref- 
ormation. 

The history of religious thought on questions of social 
ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the 
late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay 
on The Canomst Doctrine first interested me in the subject, 
by Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. 
O’Brien. But it is no reflection on their work to say that 
the most important contributions of recent years have come 
from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, 
Sombart, Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max Weber, whose 


celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist 
ix 


x INTRODUCTION 


des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No 
one can work, on however humble a scale, in the same field, 
without being conscious of the heavy obligation under which 
these scholars have laid him. While I have not always been 
able to accept their conclusions, I am glad to have this op- 
portunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret 
that Mr. Coulton’s The Medieval Village appeared too late 
for me to make use of its abundant stores of learning and 
insight. 

It only remains for me to thank the friends whose as- 
sistance has enabled me to make this book somewhat less 
imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr. J. L. 
Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have 
been kind enough to read, and to improve, the manuscript. 
Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading the proofs, 
has helped me most generously throughout with advice and 
criticism. Iam deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who 
has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the proofs 
and making an index, and to the London School of Eco- 
nomics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund 
for enabling me to make use of her services. My obligation 
to the help given by my wife is beyond acknowledgment. 


R. H. TAwney. 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 


SINCE the appearance of this book ten years ago, the litera- 
ture on its subject has considerably increased. The learned 
work of Troeltsch, the best introduction to the historical 
study of religious thought on social issues, can now be read 
in an English translation, as can also the articles of Weber 
on (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 
omission from my book of any reference to post-Reforma- 
tion Catholic opinion was a serious defect, which subsequent 
writers have done something to repair. The development 
of economic thought in mediaeval Italy; the social forces at 
work in the Germany of Luther, and his attitude to them; 
the economic doctrines of Calvin; the teaching of the Jesuits 
on usury and allied topics; English social policy during the 
Interregnum; the religious and social outlook of the French 
bourgeoisie of the same period; the attitude of Quakers, 
Wesleyans, and other bodies of English Nonconformists to 
the changing economic world which confronted them in the 
eighteenth century, have all had books devoted to them. In 
the somewhat lengthy list of articles on these and kindred 
subjects, those by the late Professor Sée, M. Halbwachs, 
and Mr. Parsons, and an article by Mr. Gordon Walker 
which has just appeared in The Economic History Review, 
specially deserve attention.* 

It will be seen, therefore, that the problems treated in the 
following pages, if they continue to perplex, have not ceased 
to arouse interest. What conclusions, if any, emerge from 
the discussion? 

The most significant are truisms. When this book first 
appeared, it was possible for a friendly reviewer, writing in 

X1 


Xil PREFACE<TO21937) EDETION 


a serious journal, to deprecate in all gravity the employment 
of the term “Capitalism” in an historical work, as a political 
catch-word, betraying a sinister intention on the part of the 
misguided author. An innocent solecism of the kind would 
not, it is probable, occur so readily to-day. Obviously, the 
word “Capitalism,” like “Feudalism” and “Mercantilism,” 
is open to misuse. Obviously, the time has now come when 
it is more important to determine the different species of 
Capitalism, and the successive phases of its growth, than to 
continue to labour the existence of the genus. But, after 
more than half a century of work on the subject by scholars 
of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety 
of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists; or 
to suggest that, if it does exist, it is unique among human 
institutions, in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eter- 
nity; or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids 
that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers. 
Verbal controversies are profitless; if an author discovers a 
more suitable term, by all means let him use it. He is un- 
likely, however, to make much of the history of Europe 
during the last three centuries, if, in addition to eschewing 
the word, he ignores the fact. 

} The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in 
history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if 
equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. 
“Trade is one thing, religion is another’: once advanced as 
an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and eco- 
nomic interests form two separate and co-ordinate king- 
doms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach 
on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the 
nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which 
its earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. 
An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an 
idea than to understand its development. The effects for 
good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION Xill 


which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, 
need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, 
it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic 
theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the 
left wing of the Reformers against usury, landgrabbing, and 
extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor states- 
. men to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin 
and his followers to establish an economic discipline more 
rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evi- 
dence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest 
on the assumption that the institution of property, the trans- 
actions of the market-place, the whole fabric of society and 
the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, 
but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All in- 
sist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the ap- 
petitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the 
acquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should 
keep its hands off business encountered, when first formu- 
lated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only 
in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was 
only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, 
that it affected the transition from the status of an odious 
paradox to that of an unquestioned truth. 

The tendency of that transition is no longer in dispute. 
Its causation and stages remain the subject of debate. The 
critical period, especially in England, was the two centuries 
following the Reformation. It is natural, therefore, that 
most recent work on the subject of this book should have 
turned its high lights on that distracted age. The most 
striking attempt to formulate a theory of the movement of 
religious thought on social issues which then took place was 
made at the beginning of the present century by a German 
scholar, Max Weber,’ in two articles published in 1904 and 
1905. Hence it is not less natural that much of that work 


XIV PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 


should, consciously or unconsciously, have had Weber as its 
starting-point. 

What exactly was the subject with which he was con- 
cerned? That question is obviously the first which should 
be asked, though not all his critics ask it. He was preparing 
to undertake the comparative study of the social outlook and 
influence of different religions, the incomplete results of 
which appeared in three volumes in 1920, under the name 
of Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. ‘The arti- 
cles, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapttalis- 
mus, were a first step towards that larger work, and subse- 
quently, corrected and amplified, formed part of its first 
volume. Weber thought that western Christianity as a 
whole, and in particular certain varieties of it, which ac- 
quired an independent life as a result of the Reformation, 
had been more favourable to the progress of Capitalism 
than some other great creeds. His articles were an attempt 
to test that generalization. 

Their scope is explained in an introduction written later 
to the Religionssoziologie. His object was to examine—the 
abstractions fall with a mournful thud on English ears— 
“the influence of certain religious ideas on the development 
of an economic spirit or the ethos of an economic system.” 
He hoped—O sancta simphcitas!—to avoid misunderstand- 
ing by underlining somewhat heavily the limitations of his 
theme. He formulated no “dogma”; on the contrary, he 
emphasized that his articles were to be regarded as merely a 
V orarbeit,® a preparatory essay. He did not seek “a psy- 
chological determination of economic events” ;* on the con- 
trary, he insisted on “the fundamental importance of the 
economic factor.’’*° He did not profess to offer a complete 
interpretation even of the religious attitude discussed in his 
articles; on the contrary, he urged the necessity of investi- 
gating how that attitude itself “was in turn influenced in its 
development and character by the totality of social condi- 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION XV 


tions, especially the economic ones.” * So far from desiring 
—to quote his own words—“to substitute for a one-sided 
‘materialistic’ an equally one-sided ‘spiritual’ interpretation 
of civilization and history,’ * he expressly repudiated any 
intention of the kind. 

In view of these disclaimers, it should not be necessary 


to point out that Weber made no attempt in the articles in’ 
question to advance a comprehensive theory of the genesis | 


and growth of Capitalism. That topic had been much dis- 


cussed in Germany since Marx opened the debate, and the 
first edition of the most massive of recent books on the 
subject, Sombart’s Der Moderne Kapitalismus, had ap- 
peared two years before. The range of Weber’s interests, 
and the sweep of his intellectual vision, were, no doubt, 
unusually wide; but his earliest work had been done on eco- 
nomic history, and he continued to lecture on that subject 
till his death in 1920. If he did not in his articles refer to 
the economic consequences of the discovery of America, or 
of the great depreciation, or of the rise to financial pre-emi- 
nence of the Catholic city of Antwerp, it was not that these 
bashful events had at last hit on an historian whose notice 
they could elude. Obviously, they were epoch-making ; obvi- 
ously, they had a profound effect, not only on economic 
organization, but on economic thought. Weber’s immediate 
problem, however, was a different one. Montesquieu re- 
marked, with perhaps excessive optimism, that the English 
“had progressed furthest of all people in three important 


things, piety, commerce and freedom.” The debt of the | 


third of these admirable attributes to the first had often 
been emphasized. Was it possible, Weber asked, that the 


second might also owe something to it?He answered that | 


question in the affirmative. TheConnecting link was to be 
found, he thought, in the influence of the religious move- 
ment whose greatest figure had been Calvin. 

Since Weber’s articles are now available in English, it is 


XVI PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 


needless to recapitulate the steps in his argument. My own 
views upon it, if I may refer to them without undue ego- 
tism, were summarized in a note—too lengthy to be read— 
to the first edition of the present work, and were later re- 
stated more fully in the introduction to the English trans- 
lation of the articles which appeared in 1930." Weber’s 
generalizations had been widely discussed by continental 
scholars for more than twenty years before this book ap- 
peared. The criticisms contained in it, therefore, had no 
claim to originality—unless, indeed, to be less anxious to 
refute an author than to understand him is in itself to be 
original. 

The first of them—that “the development of Capitalism 
in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant 
Powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the 
Discoveries and the results which flowed from them’’—has 
since been developed at some length by Mr. Robertson; but 
it was not, perhaps, quite just. Weber would have replied, 
no doubt, that such a remark, however true, was, as far as 
his articles were concerned, an ignoratio elencht. To meet 
him fairly, he would have said, one should meet him on his 
own ground, which at the moment was that, not of general 
economic history, but of religious thought on social issues. 
My second comment, already made by Brentano—that more 
weight should have been given to the political thought of 
the Renaissance—had been anticipated by Weber,°® and I 
regret that I overlooked his observations on that point. His 
gravest weaknesses in his own special field, where alone 
criticism is relevant, are not those on which most emphasis 
has usually been laid. The Calvinist applications of the 
doctrine of the “Calling’’ have, doubtless, their significance ; 
but the degree of influence which they exercised, and their 
affinity or contrast with other versions of the same idea, are 
matters of personal judgment, not of precise proof. Both 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION XVIi 


Weber and his critics have made too much of them, as I did 
myself. His account of the social theory of Calvinism, 
however, if it rightly underlined some points needing em- 
phasis, left a good deal unsaid. The lacunae in his argu- 
ment cannot here be discussed, but two of them deserve no- 
tice. Though some recent attempts to find parallels to that 
theory in contemporary Catholic writers have not been very 
happy, Weber tended to treat it as more unique than it was.*° 
More important, he exaggerated its stability and consistency. 
Taking a good deal of his evidence from a somewhat late 
phase in the history of the movement, he did not emphasize 
sufficiently the profound changes through which Calvinism 
passed in the century following the death of Calvin. 

The last point is of some moment. It suggests that the 
problem discussed by Weber requires to be restated. It is 
natural, no doubt, that much of the later work on the subject 
should have taken him for its target, and probably inevi- 
table—such is, the nature of controversy—that a theory 
which he advanced as a hypothesis to explain one range of 
phenomena, and one alone, should have been clothed for the 
purpose of criticism with the uncompromising finality of a 
remorseless dogma. His mine has paid handsome dividends ; 
but, whatever its attractions, that vein, it may be suggested, 
is now worked out. The important question, after all, is 
not what Weber wrote about the facts, still less what the 
epigont who take in his washing have suggested that he 
wrote, but what the facts were. It is an illusion to suppose 
that he stands alone in pointing to a connection between the 
religious movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies and the outburst of economic energy which was re- 
making society in the Netherlands and England. Other 
students have reached, independently of him, that not re- 
condite conclusion.** How much truth does it contain? 

To attempt a reply to that question would expand a pref- 
ace into a book. The materials for answering it are, how- 


XV1ll PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 


ever, abundant. If contemporary opinion on the point is 
not easily cited, the difficulty arises, not from lack of evi- 
dence to reveal it, but from the embarras de richesse which 
it offers for quotation. Its tenor is not doubtful. The 
truth is that the ascription to different confessions of dis- 
tinctive economic attitudes was not exceptional in the seven- 
teenth century; among writers who handled such topics it 
was almost common form. It occurs repeatedly in works 
of religious controversy. It occurs also in books, such as 
those of Temple, Petty, and Defoe, and numerous pam- 
phlets, by men whose primary interest was, not religion, but 
economic affairs. So far, in fact, from being, as has been 
suggested ** with disarming naiveté, the sinister concoction 
of a dark modern conspiracy, designed to confound Calvin- 
ism and Capitalism, godly Geneva and industrious Manches- 
ter, in a common ruin, the existence of a connection be- 
tween economic Radicalism and religious Radicalism was to 
those who saw both at first-hand something not far from 
a platitude. Until some reason is produced for rejecting 
their testimony, it had better be assumed that they knew 
what they were talking about. 

How precisely that connection should be conceived is, of 
course, a different question. It had, obviously, two sides. 
Religion influenced, to a degree which to-day is difficult to 
appreciate, men’s outlook of society. Economic and social 
changes acted powerfully on religion. Weber, as was nat- 
ural in view of his special interests, emphasized the first 
point. He did so with a wealth of knowledge and an intel- 
lectual force which deserve admiration, and not least the 
admiration of those who, like myself, have ventured to dis- 
sent from some of his conclusions. He touched the second 
point only en passant. There is truth in the criticism of Mr. 
Gordon Walker that Weber did not inquire how far the 
Reformation was a response to social needs, or investigate 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION XIX 


the causes, as well as the consequences, of the religious men- 
tality which he analysed with so much insight. 

It is that aspect of the subject which most needs work 
to-day. In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical, 
and economic, through which England passed between the 
Armada and the Revolution, every ingredient in the caldron 
worked a subtle change in every other. There was action 
and reaction. “L’esprit calviniste,” and “‘l’esprit des hommes 
nouveaux que la révolution économique du temps introduit 
dans la vie des affaires,” ** if in theory distinct, were in 
practice intertwined. Puritanism helped to mould the social 
order, but it was also itself increasingly moulded by it. Of 
the influence of the economic expansion of the age on Eng- 
lish religious thought something is said in the following 
pages. I hope that their inadequacies may prompt some 
more competent writer to deal with that subject as its im- 


portance deserves. 
R. H. TAWNEY 


"” y 
iat, Os 
nt . 





CONTENTS 


Peeve DIEVAL BACKGROUND OY. 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 
THE SIN OF AVARICE . . 
THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY . 


Il, THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 
LUTHER 
CALVIN 


Ill; THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND . 


THE LAND QUESTION . : ; : 
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY . 
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 


IV. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY . . ° . 
A GODLY DISCIPLINE VERSUS THE RELIGION OF 
TRADE . . : ° . : . 
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 
- ‘THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY . 


Mee CONGLUSION 
NOTES 


[Ds B1D2,& (3 Sie 


327 


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i Naeeed 


uy 


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CHAPTER I 
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


“Ta miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera méme un riche.” 
ANATOLE FRANCE, Le Puits de Sainie Claire. 


E 


FOUTS ADT: 


@a-* 
' , 





CHARTER 
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


“QUE pourrions-nous gagner,’ once wrote a celebrated 
economist, “a recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines 
décriées, et qui méritent de l’étre? II serait a la fois inutile 
et fastidieux de les exhumer.”* One who studies the de- 
velopment of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the 
criticism which is brought against those who disturb the 
dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he seeks an excuse be- 
yond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the re- 
flection that the past reveals to the present what the present 
is capable of seeing, and that the face which to one age is 
a blank may to another be pregnant with meaning. Writing 
when economic science was in the first flush of its dogmatic 
youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an un- 
profitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages 
unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to de- 
termine the significance of opinion is, perhaps, not altogether 
so simple a matter as he supposed. Since the brave days 
when Torrens could say of Political Economy, “Twenty 
years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any 
of its fundamental principles,” ? how many confident certain- 
ties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dis- 
missed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an un- 
suspected vitality ! 

The attempt to judge economic activity and social or- 
ganization by ethical criteria raises problems which are eter- 
nal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an age 
when that attempt was made, if with little success, at least 
with conviction and persistence, may prove, even today, not 

3 


4 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


wholly without instruction. In the present century, the old 
issues seem, indeed, to have acquired a new actuality. The 
philosophy which would keep economic interests and ethical 
idealism safely locked up in their separate compartments 
finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly restive. On 
the one hand, it is evident that the whole body of regula- 
tions, by which modern societies set limits to the free play 
of economic self-interest, implies the acceptance, whether 
deliberate or unconscious, of moral standards, by reference 
to which certain kinds of economic conduct are pronounced 
illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indications that 
religious thought is no longer content to dismiss the transac- 
tions of business and the institutions of society as matters 
irrelevant to the life of the spirit. 
Silently, but unmistakably, the conception of the scope 
and content of Christian ethics which was generally, though 
ot universally, accepted in the nineteenth century, is under- 
going a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the ex- 
perience of mankind, which is history, has played some 
part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods 
in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated 
in theory, excluded economic activities and social institu- 
tions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. 
A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose concep- 
tion of the relations of Church and State appears to have 
been modeled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine 
de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with 
the protest, “Things have come to a pretty pass if religion 
is going to interfere with private life’; and a more recent 
occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which 
must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which di- 
vides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular 
capital of public affairs.’ 
Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident to- 
day that the line of division between the spheres of religion 


THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 5 


and secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is 
shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has 
lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age ! 
of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pre- 
tensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity, 
that the spokesmen of religion “leave the present world to 
the men of business and the devil,’ * shows some signs of 
drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or 
with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent 
and in America, not only in one denomination but among 
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an at- 
tempt is being made to restate the practical implications of 
the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently 
comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the 
collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere 
both of international politics and of social organization. It 
is being made today. It has been made in the past. Whether 
it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at 
some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical 
affairs men will say, 


Here nature first begins 
Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire 
As from her outmost works, a broken foe, 


will not be known by this generation. What is certain is 
that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between 
Church and State, issues which were thought to have been 
buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own 
day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the 
forms which they have assumed and the phases through 
which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single 
country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. 
It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to 
see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by wid- 
ening the experience brought to their consideration. 


6 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND - 


In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis° has 
described the secularization of political theory as the most 
momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the 
modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it 
was only gradually that its full consequences became appar- 
ent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation 
yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. 
The political aspects of the transformation are familtar. 

ce theological mould which shaped political theory from 
the Middle Ages. to the seventeenth century is broken; poll- 
tics becomes a science, ultimately a’ group of sciences, and 
theology at best one science among others. Reason takes 
the place of revelation, and the criterion of political insti- 
tutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, 
ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into 
a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant 

( to overstep. HY 

The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new insti- 
tution, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the 
Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors 
had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was 
precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, 
of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing pri- 
vately vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made 
irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the mon- 
archy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of 
the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be disen- 
gaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the secular State, separate from the Churches, which 
are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which 
had regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The 
former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do 
not meddle with the external fabric of the political and so- 
cial system, which is the concern of the former. The age 


THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 7 


of religious struggles virtually ends with the Treaty of 
Westphalia in 1648. The age of the wars of economic 
nationalism virtually begins with the war between Eng- 
land and Holland under the Commonwealth and Charles II. 
The State, first in England, then in France and America, , 
finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a pre-. 
sumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual 
protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It ap- 
peals to no supernatural commission, but exists to protect 
individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which 
were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. “The 
great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and\ 
putting themselves under government is the preservation of 
their property.” ° 

While the political significance of this development has 
often been described, the analogous changes in social and 
economic thought have received less attention. They were, 
however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The 
emergence of an objective and passionless economic science 
took place more slowly than the corresponding movement Ay 
in the theory of the State, because the issues were eri 
sarbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the 
open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in thel 
wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had 
emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of 
the self-contained department with laws of its own begins 
generally to be applied to the world of business relations, 
and even in the England of the early seventeenth century, 
to discuss questions of economic organization purely in 
terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not 
quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, 
not only political but social theory is saturated with doc- 
trines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and 
economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal 


- 


8 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth cen- 
tury expressed them in terms of mechanism. 
Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of 
society is between those which regard the world of human 
affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a super- 
natural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern politi- 
cal theory, develops only when society is given a naturalistic 
instead of a religious explanation, and a capital fact which 
presides at the birth of both is a change in the conception 
a jheld of the nature and functions of a Church. The crucial 
period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most 
important arena (apart from Holland) is England, because 
it is in England, with its new geographical position as the 
entrepot between Europe and America, its achievement of 
internal economic unity two centuries before France and 
two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional 
revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship- 
owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the struc- 
ee of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its 
essence is the secularization of social and economic phi- 
losophy. The synthesis is resolved into its elements—poli- 
tics, business, and spiritual exercises; each assumes a sep- 
arate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own 
Jand 1 The social functions matured within the Church, 
fand long identified with it, are transferred to the State, 
which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of prosperity and 
the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of 
values, embracing all human interests and activities in a 
system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the 
conception of separate and parallel compartments, between 
which a due balance should be maintained, but which have 
no vital connection with each other. 
The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, 
and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities 
which seem to refute its general character. It is easy to de- 


THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 9 


tect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later 
Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very 
end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth 
century can anticipate the monetary theory associated with 
the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Lautentius 
de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance 
bills, and St. Antonino describe the significance of capital ; 
while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in 
the style of a medieval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can 
dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Badman, who ground 
the peor with high prices and usury, in the manner of a 
medieval friar.“ But the distance traversed in the two cen- 
turies between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At 
the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded 
far in Italy, the typical economic systems are those of the 
Schoolmen ; the typical popular teaching is that of the ser- 
mon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical 
appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the 
Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical con- 
troversy is carried on in terms of morality and religion as 
regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is con- 
ducted in terms of economic expediency. 

It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry 
VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the 
twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or 
commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness 
in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in 
the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it. 
No one can read the discussions which took place between 
1500 and 1550 on three burning issues—the rise in prices, 
capital and interest, and the land question in England— 
without being struck by the constant appeal from the new 
and clamorous economic interests of the day to the tradi- 
tional Christian morality, which in social organization, as 
in the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the 


“epi O THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


ey, 


pm 

final authority. (Tt is because it is regarded as the final au- 
thority that the officers of the Church claim to be heard on 
questions of social policy, and that, however Catholics, An- 
glicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or 
ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and 
Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that 
social morality is the province of the Church, and are pre- 
pared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by 
suitable discipline. 

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is al- 
tered. After the Restoration, we are in a new world of 
economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of 
religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good 
conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the de- 
struction of Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and 
with the failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly. 
After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory 
that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct 
was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but be- 
cause the division of the Churches made it evident that no 
common standard existed which could be enforced by ec- 
clesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration 
economists,” that, as proved by the experience of Holland, 
trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical sig- 
nificance in the fact that neither could prosper without large 
concessions to individualism. 

The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist 
is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The 
future for the next two hundred years is not with the at- 
tempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circum- 
stances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Chris- 
tians in their economic transactions, but with the new science 
of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesitation 
and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the 
letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the 


> 


THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND II 


cont ary progress of mathematics and physics, it han- 
dles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to dis- 
tinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new 
calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, 
and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including 
the clergy, evén though its particular conclusions continue 
for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, be- 
fore the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, 
Dean of Gloucester. 

Some of the particular stages in this transition will be 
discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that 
the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was 
not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar 
intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be re- 
futed by insisting that economic motives and economic needs 
are as old as history, or that({the appeal to religion is often 
a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.) A me- 
dieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, re- 
marked that “he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does 
not goes to the workhouse.” ® Mr. Coulton does well to re- 
mind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding princi- 
ples were compatible with very sordid practice. In a dis- 
cussion which has as its subject social thought, not the his- 
tory of business organization, it is not necessary to elab- 
orate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned 
will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or 
darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds ro- 
mantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the 
merits of different theories of social organization must be 
left to those who feel confident that they possess an ade- 
quate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages 
is to endeavor to understand a few among them. 

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it 
does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt ab- 
stractions. That men should have thought as they did is 


’ 
, 


iG 


12 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


sometimes as significant as that they should have aged as 
they did, and not least significant when thought and prac- 
tice are at variance. It may be true that “theory is a criti- 
cism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criti- 
cism of a bad one.” But the emphasis of the theorist on 
certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself an 
interpretation, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his 
questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions of 
the period in which they were asked. It would be para- 
doxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and 
Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age, 
merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the 
ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is 
not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated eco- 
nomic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the six- 
teenth century merely because, behind canon law and sum- 
me and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough 
and gild, behind statutes and proclamations and prerogative 
courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the economic 
man. 

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, 
and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas 
has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of phys- 
ical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowl- 
edge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be fol- 
lowed within a year by the death of half the human race. 
Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with 
which the individual is born has altered little in recorded 
history, the interests and values which compose his world 
have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conven- 
tional statement that human nature does not change is plau- 
sible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of 
it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today 
what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while 
men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, 


THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 13 


man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts 
by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon 
them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each 
generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, be- 
fore it bequeaths it to its successors. 

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, en- 
vironment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even 
when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes 
in this environment is not less profound. The economic 
categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of 
contract and competition, are as much a part of its intel- 
lectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together 
with religion, have probably been the most potent force in 
giving it its character. Between the conception of society 
as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, 
organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a 
mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic 
motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea 
that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s neces- 
sity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s provi- 
dence’; between the attitude which appeals tofa religious 
standard to repress economic appetites,) and that’ which re- 
gards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm 
which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of eco- 
nomic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to 
be explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the 
former; to trace the change, from a view of economic ac- 
tivity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral 
conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal 
and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of in- 
dividualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name 
of religion by the Church and of public policy by the State, 
first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified 
in the name of economic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastical 
authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it 


14 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


had claimed and finally abdicates them—to do this is not to 
indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivu- 
lets which are now a flood. 

Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of 
social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to 
the life of the spirit, or has it endeavored not only to chris- 
ianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? 
Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis be- 
tween personal morality and the practices which are per- 
missible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve 
the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, 
and, if so, ought a Church to endeavor to enforce it as 
among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are 
a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on 
which a more competent examination of history than I can 
hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and waver- 
ing light. 


I, THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 


We are asking these questions today. Men were asking 
the same questions, though in different language, throughout 
the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern 
economic history begins with a series of revolutionary 
changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in 
finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic 
situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradi- 
tion, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. 
Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, 
to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers 
met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doc- 
trines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained 
and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment 
became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doc- 
trines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 15 


developed, different churches produced characteristic dif- 
ferences of social opinion. 

But these were later developments, which only gradually 
became apparent. The new economic world was not ac- 
cepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, 
the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in 
matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church 
councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete uncon- 
sciousness that innovations in doctrine and church govern- 
ment involved any breach with what they had learned to 
regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the 
sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different 
schools of religious thought, but between the changed eco- 
nomic environment and the accepted theory of society. To 
understand it, one must place oneself at the point from 
which it started. One must examine, however summarily, 
the historical background. 

That background consisted of the body of social theory, 
stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle 
Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, 
the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and 
its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and 
religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those 
implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were 
complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice 
truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian 
is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five 
centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title 
of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic condi- 
tions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion 
to be discarded. 

The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, 
by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the 
fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the 
north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic 


% 


16 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the 
east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated 
along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to 
the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any 
naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and eas- 
ily cut by any military power which could squat across the 
trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, 
these broad facts determined that the two main currents of 
trade should run from east to west and north to south, and 
that the most progressive economic life of the age should 
cluster in the regions from which these currents started 
and where they met, within this general economic frame- 
work there was the greatest variety of condition and devel- 
opment. The contours of economic civilization ran on dif- 
ferent lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the 
contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly 
marked. If the sites on which a complex economic struc- 
ture rose were far removed from those of later genera- 
tions, it flourished none the less where conditions favored 
its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, 
there was as much difference between the life of a center 
of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a 
center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, 
and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little 
food, like medieval England, as there is between modern 
Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw 
from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnat- 
ing in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, 
is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in 
the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands 
or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the 
Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. 
Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine 
which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as 
typical of it the Swmme of the Schoolmen, he finds it in 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 17 


constant process of development. The economic teaching of 
St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far 
more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the 
thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages 
the best-established and most characteristic parts of the sys- 
tem—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so 
far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elabo- 
rated. } | 

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious 
opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions 
and economic relations. It may stand on one side in asceticf 
aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere 
of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from 
which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but 
which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them“5 
for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference be- 
longing to a world with which religion has no concern; in 
all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face 
and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justi- 
fication. It may throw itself into an agitation for some par- 3 
ticular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for 
the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaug- 
urate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once 
accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross yh 
world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from 
amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that 
this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such 
a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or 
dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to 
be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched 
with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most 
sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is 
everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not 
shed everywhere in the same degree.” 

Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us 


18 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period 
and place and economic environment and personal tempera- 
ment evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper 
redominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in 
economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks 
that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by 
cheating and profiteering.*® It is monasticism, with its repu- 
diation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, 
which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase 
of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to re- 
store the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical 
poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many 
of his followers, was the note of the majority of move- 
ments for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for 
all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the 
“just man is already lord of all’ and that “in this world 
God must serve the devil,’ but an anticipation of the doc- 
trine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly 
misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when 
he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must 
expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. 
Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain 
and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure 
sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be 
cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and 
that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them— 
the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred. 
To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society 
and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s 
own small net, and to label them “medieval thought,” is 
to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if real- 
ized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has 
long since passed when it could be suggested that only one- 
half of modern Christianity has its root in medieval re- 
ligion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 19 


as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of 
ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in 
his excellent book," Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have 
their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of 
religion and political thought is equally true of economic 
and social doctrines. ‘The social theories of Luther and 
Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Ana- 
baptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like 
Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers 
like Bellers, are all the children of medieval parents. Like 
the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged 
from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had 
been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, 


as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work ' 


of conversion and of social construction had been almost 
indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much 
as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest 
of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, 
not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shat- 
tered at the Reformation, the different Churches which 
emerged from it endeavored, according to their different 
opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism 
or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which 
does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis 
of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all 
alike, in one form or another, are represented in the reli- 
gious thought and practice of the Middle Ages. 

All are represented in it, but not all are equally repre- 
sentative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is 
the last which 1s most characteristic. The first fundamental 
assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is 
that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activi- 
ties is religion. The architectonics of the system had been 
worked out in the Summe of the Schoolmen. In sharp 
contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination 


/? 


20 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, me- 
dieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, 
by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a 
single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, 
since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at 
least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in 
their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine 
plan of the universe. “The perfect happiness of man can- 
not be other than the vision of the divine essence.” ** 
Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, 
though with different degrees of immediateness, are related 
to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The 
. | Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, 
within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower 
sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its in- 
terpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its 
authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at vari- 
Jin with theory, there is no absolute division between the 





inner and personal life, which is “the sphere of religion,’ 
and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal 
mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be 
trusted, religion is irrelevant. 
There is no absolute division, but there is a division of 
. quality. There are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of 
reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that 
contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable 
antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, 
and that the world of social organization, originating in 
physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that 
of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity 
of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, 
as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, 
an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society— 
“to know the truth about God and to live in communities.” ** 
‘hese activities, which form his life according to the law 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 21 


of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, 
as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the 
characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis. 
The contrast between nature and grace, between human . 
appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but 
relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing 
it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace 
works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy | 
but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is 
true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new sig- 
nificance by relating it to the purpose of human life as 
known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or no- 
torious) Bull: “The way of religion is to lead the things 
which are lower to the things which are higher through 
the things which are intermediate. According to the law ; . 
of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally rc 
and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, 
the intermediate through the higher.” ** Thus social insti- 
tutions assume a character which may almost be called sac- el 
ramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expres-— 
sion Of-a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, so- 
ciety is an Gheasshot different grades, and human activi- 
ties form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and 
in significance, but each of which is of value on its own 
plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by 
the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of 
which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is 
straining upwards: 


Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse 
Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia, 
Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse. 


Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not 
the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. 
The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial ac- 


22 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


tivity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it 
all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, 
also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the 
teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation 
of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the 
eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nine- 
teenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the six- 
teenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all 
€ \spects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally 
rom the working of that idea in the economic environ- 
ment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the 
» functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of 
~ econgmic ethics. 

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work 
of Beckett’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII's 
chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described 
—an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—is the 
same.’ Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extor- 
tion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, 
it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical in- 
dividualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is 
that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order 
are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are 
accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare oc- 
casions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they 
include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice 
of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploita- 
tion, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be 
treated as simply alien to religion, for_religion is all-compre- 
hensive. They must be given some ethical meanings must be 
shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The mean- 
ing given them is simple. The facts of class status and in- 
equality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional 
theory of society, as the facts of competition were rational- 
ized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies ; 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 23 


and the former took the same delight in contemplating the 
moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter 
in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society 
a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, 
like the human body, is an organism composed of different 
members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or 
defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must 
receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no 
more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes 
into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short. 
Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a 
class cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to 
us—enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those 
above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen 
and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their 
calling, and no more. 

_As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repres- 
sive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as rea- 
son is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is 
due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings 
is damnable.” *® As a philosophy of society, it attempted 
to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine 
universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that 
process of transmutation the life of mere money-making 
was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to 
it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and 
trade, the essense of which seemed to be, not service, but a 
mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily inter- 
preted in terms of social function. Comparatively late in- 
truders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out 
in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoni- 
ously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they 
grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its over- 
throw. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of 
the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the war- 


24 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


rior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life 
of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were 
to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and 
the ritual which surrounded them was designed to empha- 
size that they had undergone a re-dedication at the hands of 
religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power be- 
came office and duty. 

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in at- 
tempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising 
the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dig- 
nify material interests, by stamping them with the impress 
of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and 
oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be 
told that their true function was “to defend God’s law by 
power of the world.” 7 Craftsmen—the burden of end- 
less sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not 
wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service 
to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common 
people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of 
those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant 
and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, 
was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion 
of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and 
economic power must alike give way? “The health of the 
whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the 
higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in 
like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member 
ofievery other.” 

If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting 
sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was 
at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity 
which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. 
To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed 
went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they 
were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 25 


more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like 
some of their descendants, that competition was designed 
by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for hon- 
esty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expres- 
sion of economic self-interest, but as held together by a 
system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well- 
being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs 
its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. 
“The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and 
defenders, and . . . laborers. . . . As she is our mother, 
so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that 
one part of her answer to another, after the same measure 
that Jesus Christ has ordained it. . . . Kindly man’s hand 
helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his 
body . . . and thus should it be in parts of the Church. .. . 
As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took 
the service of another and left his own proper work, so div- 
ers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; 
and if one part leave his work that God has limited him 
and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the 
Church. . . . Surely the Church shall never be whole be- 
fore proportions of her parts be brought again by this 
heavenly leech and [by] medicine of men.” *” 

Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, how- 
ever radical it is, the established order. Clearly this pa- 
triarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land 
system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic 
ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval in- 
dustry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to aban- 
don nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, can- 
not admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic 
relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and re- 
ligion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they 
may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the 
later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less in- 


26 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


tractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than 
it is today. In the great commercial centers there was 
sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which 
the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class 
wars between artisans and merchants.*° But outside them 
trade, industry, the money market, all that we call the eco- 
nomic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual 
trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were 
a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little 
mobility or competition. There was very little large-scale 
organization, With some important exceptions, such as the 
textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth 
century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval arti- 
san, especially in backward countries like England, was a 
small master. The formation of temporary organizations, 
or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on in Lon- 
don even before the end of the thirteenth century,” and the 
growth of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle 
Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced mod- 
ern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great 
city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the 
thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, 
who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. 
At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 
750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the 
service of 1,554 masters.” 

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their com- 
parative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large 
enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for 
each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was 
not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such condi- 
tions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial in- 
stitutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything 
like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of 
a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM ae 


than nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though 
friendly societies called gilds were common, there was nat- 
urally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns 
it is a question whether there was not a considerable popu- 
lation of casual workers—consider only the number of un- 
skilled workers that must have been required as laborers 
by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before 
mechanical cranes—who were rarely organized in perma- 
nent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of eco- 
nomic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first 
and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their 
vested interests came into collision with the consumer were 
not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the 
conception of a unitary society over-riding particular in- 
terests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced 
against corporations, on the ground that they distracted so- 
cial unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinis- 
ter ambitions; but there was probably from time to time 
more than a little justification for his complaint that “all 
new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run 
in this curse [against false conspirators], because “they 
conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress 
other men in their right by their wit and power.” ** It is 
significant that the most striking of the projects of political 
and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the cen- 
tury before the Reformation proposed the complete abolition 
of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.” 

There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An 
age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service 
to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic, 
after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from 
economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to 
social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social 
and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce 
petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French gilds, 


28 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


“était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste 
salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme 
aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises ; mais une régle 
puissante s’imposait a tous et d’une maniére générale exi- 
geait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par 1|’Evan- 
gile.” °° The attempt to preserve a rough equality among 
“the good men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism 
by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune 
with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist 
the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to pre- 
serve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, 
and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural 
appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself 
to the injury of all—whether these things outweigh the evils 
of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a 
question which each student will answer in accordance with 
his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both 
the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the 
Church were prompted by the problems of a common en- 
vironment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, 
intimate and direct, and there was little room for organi- 
zation on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied 
to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples 
and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic ex- 
pediency. 3 

Such an environment, with its personal economic rela- 
tions, was a not unfavorable field for a system of social 
ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tre- 
mendous claim to mediate between even the humblest ac- 
tivity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its 
teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in 
the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Con- 
temporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of eco- 
nomic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look 
at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 29 


continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, 
and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” 
At Rome, everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the 
gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the 
marks of silver.*® 


Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti, 
Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti. 


Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re, 
Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare; 
Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare, 
‘Payez, payez, dit le mot, si vis impetrare.?7 


The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center 
of the most highly organized administrative system of the 
age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and re- 
ceiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other 
Governments still included personal services and payments 
in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the 
Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the 
title of “peculiar sons of the Roman Church.” ** Grosstéte 
rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London ex- 
pelled them, but papal protection brought them back.”® 
Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore 
Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunica- 
tion, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest 
demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the arch- 
bishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special man- 
date, it would be my duty to take strong measures against 
such lenders.” *° The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest | 
financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal 
system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. 
The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century 
were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, 
if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as 


30 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage 
in trade and take usury.** Cathedral chapters lend money 
at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those 
of simony, should have been refused by churchmen, as hate- 
ful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a 
usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging res- 
titution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth 
to the building of Notre-Dame.*? “Thus,” exclaimed St.’ 
Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, 
“wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bring- 
eth money. . . . O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain 
than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beg- 
garly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and 
leaves her sons naked.” *° 

The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to 
those, like M. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish 
romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they 
are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is 
not less one-sided than to conceal their existence ; and, when 
the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what 
principles men valued, and what standards they erected. 
The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summe of the 
Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most sys- 
tematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the | 
fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throw- 
ing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid pre- 
occupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever 
may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and 
the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic ques- 
tions were eminently practical. The movement which 
‘prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and 
of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories 
were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal 
hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the 
problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 31 


reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from 
economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded 
by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who 
damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrel- 
evant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own 
age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual move- 
ment. By lifting the weight of antiquated formule they 
cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious au- 
thority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus 
supplied an intellectual justification for developments which 
earlier generations would have condemned. 

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a con- 
siderable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and 
interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers 
to the technique of economic theory were less significant 
than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both 
of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that 
economic interests are subordinate to the real business of 
life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one 
aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts 
of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are 
necessary ; they have a secondary importance, since without 
them men cannot support themselves and help one another ; 
the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,** will consider in found- 
ing his State the natural resources of the country. But eco- 
nomic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful ap- 
petites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to ap- 
plaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, 
it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is 
no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is 
not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society 
upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a 
~ constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other 
natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, 


32 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less 
irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social 
philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary hu- 
man attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The 
outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods 
are instrumental—sicut quedam adminicula, quibus ad- 
juvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. “It is lawful to 
desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, 
as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them 
as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our cor- 
poral life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.’ *° 
Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man, not man for 
riches. 

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, 
warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere 
with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such 
wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To 
seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a 
deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of 
different countries show that it was intended by Providence. 
But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that 
he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits 
which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. 
Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a 
fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods 
are private than when they are common. But it is to be 
tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as 
desirable in itself; the ideal—if only man’s nature could 
rise to it—is communism. ‘“‘Communis enim,’ wrote Gra- 
tian in his decretum, “usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, 
omnibus hominibus esse debuit.” *® At best, indeed, the es- 
tate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately ac- 
quired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. 
It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must 
as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 33) 


to share it with those who need, even if they are not in ac- 
tual destitution. Such were the conditions which com- 
mended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital 
of fifteenth-century Europe.** There have been ages in 
which they would have been described, not as a justification 
of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to de- 
fend the property of the peasant and small master is neces- 
sarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which 
grows by devouring it. 

‘The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested 
was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests _ 
increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pe- 
cuniary motives associated with them. Labor—the common 
BAG aan ie neesa and honorable ; trade is neces- 
sary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at 
best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inver- 
sion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best 
revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. 
The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was 
partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from clas- 
sical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the 
State which had small need of merchants because it could 
meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the 
Philosopher himself praised avrapxeia ? But it was a con- 
vention which coincided with a vital element in medieval 
social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections 
of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade 
is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies 
of one country with the abundance of another. If there 
were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indul- 
gence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have 
to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, 
and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate 
to the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.** 

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. 


34 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


For why should a defence be required? The insistence that 
trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices 
of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in 
the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe 
periculosa est venditionis et emptions negotiatio.° The 
explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of con- 
temporary economic organization. The economy of the 
medieval borough—consider only its treatment of food sup- 
plies and prices—was one in which consumption held some- 
what the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed 
arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached 
to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though con- 

* venient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and pro- 
vided loans, and to great establishments such as monas-, 
teries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double 
unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical 
commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists 
to the trader is the network of restrictions with which 
medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent 
storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthless- 
ness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who 
intervened between consumer and producer. 

Apart, however, from the color which it took from its 
environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own 
for holding that business, as distinct from labor, required 
some special justification. The suspicion of economic mo- 
tives had been one of the earliest elements in the social 
teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism 
endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sanctifi- 

UU] cation. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which 
condemned all commerce as the sphere of-iniquity, was soft- 
ened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not 
obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent 
to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a 
position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites ; and 


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM _ 35 


towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers 
have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of 
the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by 
the ears. The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks 
what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The mer- 
chant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The tra- 
ditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: 
“Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and 
unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning 
something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it 
in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged 
and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers 
who are cast forth from God’s temple.” *° By very defini- 
tion a man who “buys in order that he may sell dearer,” the 
trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own 
pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public 
spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means 
into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is justly con- 
demned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of 
gain: *** 

The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once 
perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in 
the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to 
treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the quali- 
fication that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration 
for the merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehen- 
sible as turpe lucrum. ‘The condition of the trader’s exon- 
eration is that “‘he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages 
of his labor.” ** Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was 
difficult of application, for evidently it implied the accept- 
ance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to 
describe as “an affectation not very common among mer- 
chants.” But the motives which prompted it were character- 
istic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely 
that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase 


99 


36 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a 
quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most mer- 
ciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the 
economic virtues. ‘He who has enough to satisfy his 
wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and 
nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in 
order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently 
he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons 
may become men of wealth and importance—all such are in- 
cited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.” “* Two 
and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the 
economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more 
unmeasured language, was to say the same.** ‘The essence 
of the argument was that payment may properly be de- 
manded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the 
merchants who transport them, for both labor in their voca- 
tion and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is 
that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches pri- 
vate gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true 
descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory 
of value. ‘The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx. 


II. THE SIN OF AVARICE 


If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they re- 
quired to be translated into terms of the particular transac- 
tions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. 
Their practical expression was the body of economic casuis- 
try, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with 
regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. 
These doctrines sprang as much from the popular conscious- 
ness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from 
the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fa- 
bles of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or 
whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 37) 


or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks), “about the 
year 1240,” on entering a church to be married, was crushed 
by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by 
the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his 
money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illum- 
inating than the refinements of lawyers.*° 

On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, 
as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was 
preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on 
economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moral- 
ists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were 
accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any un- 
natural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow 
rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as 
to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar sub- 
jects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men 
might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds 
and boroughs might forbid their members to plead before 
ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves 
made for the conduct of business had more than a flavor of 
the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of me- 
dieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authorities 
fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the 
fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited 
credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to 
conduct a business forbidden to Christians.** Cologne was 
one of the greatest of commercial entrepots; but, when its 
successful business man came to make his will, he remem- 
bered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly 
sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his 
sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous 
occupation than that of the merchant.*’ The burgesses of 
Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights 
for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that 


38 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and 
fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor, 
councillor, or master of the gild.** It was not that laymen 
were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was © 
all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds 
through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment 
long after it was repudiated as a command. It was that the 
facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irre- 
sistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision be- 
tween the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of 
the world of business—its individual practice was, of course, 
another matter—because both were formed by the same en- 
vironment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to 
social expediency. 

The economic background of it all was very simple. The 
medieval consumer—we can sympathize with him today 
more easily than in 1914— ‘is like a traveller condemned to 
spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house 
and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Mo- 
nopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval in- 
dustry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a 
public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to 
see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of | 
small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burn- 
ing question, for, except in the great industrial centers of 
Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is 
small. Usury is, as it is today in similar circumstances. 
For loans are made largely for consumption, not for pro- 
duction. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts 
die, or the artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed- 
corn, cattle, raw materials, and his distress is the money- 
lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate pop- 
ular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to 
ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many 
into the hands of one, the money-lender who takes advan- 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 39 


tage of his neighbor’s necessities to get a lien on their land 
and foreclose. ‘The usurer would not loan to men these 
goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than 
charity. Many other sins be more than this usury, but for 
this men curse and hate it more than other sin.” *° 

No one who examines the cases actually heard by the 
courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment 
surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities 
of commercial immorality.°° Among the peasants and small 
masters who composed the mass of the population in me- 
dieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and 
it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the 
world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards 
the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that 
“Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for ac- 
commodation,’ and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius 
maximus,°* should be regarded as figures at once too scan- 
dalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient 
to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this pop- 
ular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystal- 
lizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached 
from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and en- 
forced, in the last resource, through the courts. 

The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural 
law. “Every law framed by man bears the character of a 
law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the 
law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the 
law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere per- 
version of law.” °* The plausible doctrine of compensations, 
of the long run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not 
yet been invented, The idea of a law of nature—of natural 
justice which ought to find expression in positive law, but 
which is not exhausted in it—supplies an ideal standard by 
which the equity of particular relations can be measured. 
The most fundamental difference between medieval and 


nn 


40 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, 
whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency, 
however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any 
particular action, policy, or system of organization, the for- 
mer starts from the position that there is a moral authority 
to which considerations of economic expediency must be 
subordinated. The practical application of this conception 
is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, 
which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the for- 
tuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man 
must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authori- 
ties, or, failing that, by common estimation. True, prices 
even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigor, 
theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect 
of changing supplies. But they will not vary with individ- 


_ ual necessity or individual opportunity. The bugbear is the 
» man who uses, or even creates, a temporary shortage, the 


man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the 
man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not 
have been poor yesterday and rich today.” 

The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, 
through a considerable development. The dominant con- 
ception of Aquinas—that prices, though they will vary with” 
the varying conditions of different markets, should corre- 
spond with the labor and costs of the producer, as the 
proper basis of the communis estimatio, conformity with 
which was the safeguard against extortion—was qualified 
by subsequent writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth 
century emphasized the subjective element in the common 
estimation, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and 
drew the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be 


“ reached under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that 


a bargain had been struck showed that both parties were 
satisfied.** Inthe fifteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote 
with a highly developed commercial civilization beneath his 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 4I 


eyes, endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the princi- 
ple of the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the 
necessary play should be left to economic motives. After a 
subtle analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded 
that the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of 
“probability and conjecture,” since it would vary with places, 
periods and persons. His practical contribution was to in- 
troduce a new elasticity into the whole conception by dis- 
tinguishing three grades of prices—a gradus pius, discretus, 
and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more 
than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitu- 
tion, and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, 
required atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental 
lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within 
which prices might move without involving sin.” 

This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal 
forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the in- 
tense economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evi- 
dently contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The 
fact that it should have begun to be expounded as early as 
the middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the 
economic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much 
more various and much more modern than is sometimes 
suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was different. 
It was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard 
against extortion. ‘To leave the prices of goods at the dis- 
cretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which 
goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.” Prices 
must be such, and no more than such, as will enable each 
man to “‘have the necessaries of life suitable for his station.” 
The most desirable course is that they should be fixed by 
public officials, after making an enquiry into the supplies 
available and framing an estimate of the requirements of 
different classes. Failing that, the individual must fix 
prices for himself, guided by a consideration of “what he 


42 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


must charge in order to maintain his position, and nourish 
himself suitably in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his 
expenditure and labor.” °° If the latter recommendation 
was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a plati- 
tude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry 
out before breakfast. 

No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, 
of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that 
he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; 
for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung 
from man. He may demand compensation—interesse—if 
he is not repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may 
ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he 
foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is 
contingent and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when 
John Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself 
to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore 
the principal, for this is compensation for damages in- 
curred; or when Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Bur- 
wode three marks of silver in return for an annual rent of 
six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not a 
loan; or when James le Reve of London advances £100 to 
Robert de Bree of Dublin, merchant, with which to trade 
for two years in Ireland, for this is a partnership; or when 
the priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital sum 
paid down.*’ What remained to the end unlawful was that 
which appears in modern economic text-books as “pure in- 
terest’’—interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance 
for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender. 
“Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum 
. . . quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per pactum vel exac- 
tionem, usura est, quodcunque nomen sibi imponat.” °* The 
emphasis was on pactum. The essence of usury was that 
it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or 
lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 43 


which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they 
sare reasonable—for is -not every one in a small way a 
profit-maker ?—has no mercy for the debenture-holder. His 
crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed 
and certain, and such a payment is usury. 

The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more 
subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth 
of the habit of investment, of a market for capital, and 
of new forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and 
exchange business, theory became steadily more elaborate, 
and schools more sharply divided. The precise meaning 
and scope of the indulgence extended to the purchase of 
rent-charges produced one controversy, the foreign ex- 
changes another, the development of Monts de Piété a third. 
Even before the end of the fourteenth century there had 
been writers who argued that interest was the remuneration 
of the services rendered by the lender, and who pointed out 
(though apparently they did not draw the modern corol- 
lary) that present are more valuable than future goods.” 
But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lend- 
ing, theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, 
was unanimous, and its modern interpreter,°? who sees in its 
indulgence to interesse the condonation of interest, would 
have created a scandal in theological circles in any age be- 
fore that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; 
it is contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is 
to live without labor; it is to sell time, which belongs to 
God, for the advantage of wicked men; it is to rob those 
who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it 
profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, 
for the benefit of the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the 
value of the principal sum lent him; it is in defiance of 
sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money is made, , 
the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and 


44 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


why should the creditor demand payment from a man who 
is merely using what is now his own? 

The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There 
were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 
35—apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the 
Politics, which some now say was mistranslated also.** But 
practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine 
than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given 
it in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit 
system, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could 
be said that “he who borrows is always under stress of 
necessity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men 
would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, ex- 
cept when they could do nought else, and so there would 
be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger; 
for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not 
be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, 
since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, 
for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their 
money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky 
investments.” °° The man who used these arguments was 
not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consum- 
mate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in Real- 
politik, and one of the ablest statesmen of his day. 

True, the Church could not dispense with commercial 
wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The dis- 
tinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and 
high finance, which is eminently honorable, was as familiar 
in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century ; and no rea- 
sonable judgment of the medieval denunciation of usury is 
possible, unless it is remembered that whole ranges of finan- 
cial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was 
rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal 

-magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to 


THE SIN OF AVARICE a8 


pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, 
if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the 
hands of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor 
to book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy 
itself; Popes regularly employed the international banking- 
houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was fre- 
quently complained, to the morality of their business meth- 
ods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes 
enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommu- 
nication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the interna- 
tional money-market escaped from it; in the fourteenth cen- 
tury Italy was full of banking-houses doing foreign ex- 
change business in every commercial center from Constan- 
tinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of 
Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the 
negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts. 

It was not that transactions of this type were expressly 
excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time 
evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypoc- 
risy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated 
by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither com- 
merce nor government could be carried on without credit. 
It was that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and 
practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was 
based, had reference to a quite different order of economic 
activities from that represented by loans from great bank- 
ing-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their 
clients. Its object was simple and direct—to prevent the 
well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of 
the peasant or the craftsman; its categories, which were 
quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of 
personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings 
among small men that oppression was easiest and its results 
mast pitiable. It was for them that the Church’s scheme of 


46 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


economic ethics had been worked out, and with reference 
to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant 
to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity. 

It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in 
so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, 
by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesias- 
tical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often 
analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude to it. 
Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the 
clergy.°* The Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down 
rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money 
to persons in need, take their possessions in pawn, and re- 
ceive profits beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived 
of their office.°* Manifest usurers are not to be admitted 
to communion or Christian burial; their offerings are not 
to be accepted ; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are 
to be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.“ 
The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury 
was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of 
Lyons (1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re- 
enacted the measures laid down by the third Lateran Council 
(1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually 
made the money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, 
under pain of excommunication or interdict, was to let 
houses to usurers, but was to expel them (had they been ad- 
mitted) within three months. They were to be refused con- 
fession, absolution and Christian burial until they had made 
restitution, and their wills were to be invalid.** The legis- 
lation of the Council of Vienne was even more sweeping. 
Declaring that it has learned with dismay that there are 
communities which, contrary to human and divine law, 
sanction usury and compel debtors to observe usurious con- 
tracts, it declares that all rulers and magistrates knowingly 
maintaining such laws are to incur excommunication, and 


; 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 47 


requires the legislation in question to be revoked within three 
months. Since the true nature of usurious transactions is 
often concealed beneath various specious devices, money- 
lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities 
to submit their accounts to examination. Any person obsti- 
nately declaring that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a 
heretic, and inquisitors are to proceed against him tanquam 
contra diffamatos vel suspectos de heresi.®® 

It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either 
of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the 
superiority of the moral law to economic expediency, than 
the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that all 
secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But, 
for an understanding of the way in which the system was 
intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps 
less illuminating than the correspondence between the papal 
Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on specific 
cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those 
who have made money by usury bound to make restitution? 
Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the 
original offenders. The pious object of ransoming prison- 
ers is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man 
is to be accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, 
but if he allows for the element of time in a bargain, by 
asking a higher price when he sells on credit. Even when 
debtors have sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ec- 
clesiastical authorities are to compel the latter to restore 
their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by the protec- 
tion given to usurers by the powerful, punishment can be 
imposed without their evidence, provided that the offence 
is a matter of common notoriety. An archbishop of Can- 
terbury is reminded that usury is perilous, not only for the 
clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use ec- 
clesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the 
deduction of interest, of property which has been pawned. 


48 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


Usurers, says a papal letter to the archbishop of Salerno, ob- 
ject to restoring gains, or say that they have not the means; 
he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to 
those from whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; 
when neither course is possible, they are to give it to the 
poor; for, as Augustine says, non remittitur peccatum, mist 
restituitur ablatum. At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a 
practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given 
term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at 
the moment when the sale took place. It is not clear that 
such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the 
sellers run into sin, unless there is a probability that the 
wares will have changed in value by the time that payment 
is made; “and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a 
wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making con- 
tracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be 
concealed from Almighty God.” ® 

It is evident from the number of ‘doubtful cases referred 
to Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury 
was not easily administered. It is evident, also, that efforts 
were made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and 
technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn 
up in the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal 
penitentiary in dealing with hard cases, precedents were in- 
serted to show how usurers should be handled.*° About 
the same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the duties 
of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to 
be made on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of ex- 
tortion, and designed to expose the various illusory con- 
tracts—fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, 
excessive deposits against advances—by which the offence 
was concealed.” Instructions to confessors define in equal 
detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a 
series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning 
merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 49 


covetousness.’’ Barons and knights are to be requested to 
state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the 
liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking 
it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or 
services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers 
(ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, 
usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and 
lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and 
craft. Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire 
as to theft and detention of the property of others, espe- 
cially with regard to tithes . . . also as to the removing of 
landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land... . 
Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou 
been guilty of simony . .. an unjust judge... a thief, 
a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a re- 
mover of landmarks in fields . . . a false merchant, an 
oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards and 
others in misery, for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?’ 
Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large 
alms, on the principle that “‘contraries are to be cured-with 
contraries.”” But there are certain sins for which no true 
penitence is possible until restitution has been made. Of 
these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes, not 
only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those 
who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy 
cheaper. If for practical reasons restitution is impossible, 
the offender is to be instructed to require that it shall be 
made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be 
found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the 
bishop if the sum is large and of the priest if it is small, 
“on pious works and especially on the poor.” ” 

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated 
by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books 
for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them 
to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth 


50 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint 
that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpre- 
tation, by taking as his illustration the books which had 
been written on the text, ““Lend, hoping for nothing again,” 
and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little 
enough “to answer... all the hard, scrupulous doubts 
and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s 
bargains and chafferings together.” * A century later there 
were regions in which such doctrine was still being re- 
hearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which 
made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. 
But the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which 
was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to com- 
promise with the economic frailties of his fellow-country- 
men. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, 
covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous 
landlords who grind their tenants, and in general—a com- 
prehensive and embarrassing indictment—“all wretches that 
will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep 
their neighbor from poverty and mischance and do it not.” ™ 

On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt 
in practice with these matters, we have very little light. 
They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent 
we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war 
on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the 
secular authorities, to whom the money-lender is too con- 
venient to be victimized by any one but themselves.” At the 
end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges 
makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,“° and 
seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 
florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers. In 
England commercial morality was a debatable land, in which 
ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to 
time for jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to 
deal with cases of breach of contract in general, on the 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 51 


ground that they involved lesio fidei, and with usury in 
particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbid- 
den by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the 
Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Consti- 
tutions of Clarendon,** had expressly reserved proceedings 
as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was 
laid down more than once in the course of the next cen- 
tury. The latter again and again forbade burgesses to take 
proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those who dis- 
regarded the prohibition.’® Both, in spite of repeated pro- 
tests from the clergy,*° made good their pretension to han- 
dle usurious contracts in secular courts; but neither suc- 
ceeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church. The ques- 
tion at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished 
—a point as to which there was only one opinion—but who 
should have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in 
practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local au- 
thorities, from the City of London to the humblest ma- 
norial court, make by-laws against “unlawful chevisance”’ 
and present offenders against them.** The Commons pray 
that Lombard brokers may be banished, and that the or- 
dinances of London concerning them may be made of gen- 
eral application.“ The justices in eyre hear indictments of 
usurers,** and the Court of Chancery handles petitions from 
victims who can get no redress at common law.** And Holy 
Church, though there seems to be only one example of legis- 
lation on the subject by an English Church Council,* con- 
tinues to deal with the usurer after her own manner. 

For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising 
resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and 
the expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it 1s 
evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at 
least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the 
middle of the fourteenth century, was their right to try 
cases of usury contested by the secular authorities. A 


52 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before) the 
King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the 
Church of usurers living. The same reservation of ec- 
clesiastical rights was repeated when the question was taken 
up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an an- 
tiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty 
capitalism under Elizabeth and James I.*° 

That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of 
enforcing the canon law in connection with money-lending 
is improbable. It was naturally in the commercial towns 
that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns 
did not look with favor on the interference of churchmen 
in matters of business. In London, collisions between the 
courts of the Official, the Mayor and the King were fre- 
quent in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceed- 
ings before the first, it seems, when a speedy decision was 
desired, or when their case was of a kind which secular 
courts were not likely to regard with favor. Thus crafts- 
men, to give one curious example out of many, were evi- 
dently using the courts christian as a means of giving ef- 
fect to trade union regulations, which were more likely to 
be punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by 
the simple device of imposing an oath and proceeding against 
those who broke it for breach of faith. The smiths, for 
instance, made a “confederacy,” supported by an oath, with 
the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, 
but, as was alleged in court, of preventing any but members 
of their organization from working at the trade, and sum- 
moned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts. The spur- 
riers forbade any one to work between sunset and sunrise, 
and haled an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, 
with the result that “the said Richard, after being three 
times warned by the Official, had been expelled from the 
Church and excommunicated, until he would swear to keep 
the ordinance.” *7 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 53 


Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of 
the activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to 
show that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused 
of usury undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.** 
Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on 
the ground that they have failed to secure justice in the 
courts of bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of 
debts or usury have been begun before “‘spiritual men.” *° 
The records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though some- 
times commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to 
the secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury 
continued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.*°® The dis- 
reputable family of Marcroft—William the father was a 
common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pente- 
cost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day— 
is punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it de- 
serves." At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to 
settle the case out of court.°” The Commissary of London 
cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurarie pravitatis, on 
the ground that, having advanced four shillings on the se- 
curity of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve 
pence over and above the principal, and suspends him when 
he does not appear in court.°* Nor did business of this 
kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of usury were 
being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and 
even in a great commercial center like the City of London it 
was still possible in the reign of James I for the Bishop’s 
Commissary to be trying tradesmen for “lending upon 
pawnes for an excessive gain.” ** | 

It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an at- 
tempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the ex- 
actions of the money-lender. From a very early date 
there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of 
the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could 
be “colored,” direct prohibition was almost necessarily im- 


54 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


potent, and which favored the policy of providing facilities 
for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be ob- 
tained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to 
turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions 
where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious 
fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps monasteries lend 
corn, cattle and money.’® In England, bishops are organ- 
izing such loans with papal approval in the middle of the 
thirteenth century,°® and two centuries later, about 1462, 
the Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of Monts 
de Piété, which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of 
the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low 
Countries, and, though never taken up in England—for 
the Reformation intervened—supplied a topic of frequent 
comment and eulogy to English writers on economic eth- 
ics.°’ The canon law on the subject of money-lending un- 
derwent a steady development, caused by the necessity of 
adapting it to the increasing complexity of business or- 
ganization, down at least to the Lateran Council of 1515. 
The ingenuity with which professional opinion elaborated 
the code was itself a proof that considerable business— 
and fees—were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve 
God for naught. The canonists, who had a bad reputa- 
tion with the laity, were not, to put it mildly, more inno- 
cent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making busi- 
ness. The Italians, in particular, as was natural in the 
financial capital of Europe, made the pace, and Italian 
canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In Eng- 
land, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were 
unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, be- 
cause “they do not fear to make contracts on usury,” °° or, 
most probably, because English business was a conserva- 
tive and slow-going affair, the English canonist Lyndwood 
is content to quote a sentence from an English archbishop 
of the thirteenth century and to leave it at that.®° 


THE SIN OF AVARICE 55 


But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the 
essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and 
selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neigh- 
borly or unneighborly conduct. Though a rationalist like 
Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not 
hateful to God,*°° it has a traditional prejudice against the 
arts by which men—or at least laymen—acquire riches, 
and is apt to lump them together under the ugly name of 
avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lend- 
ers who grind the poor, it regards, not as business strate- 
gists, but as nefande bellue—monsters of iniquity. As 
for grocers and victualers “who conspire wickedly together 
that none shall sell better cheap than another,’ and specu- 
lators “who buy up corn, meat and wine... to amass 
money at the cost of others,” they are “according to the 
laws of the Church no better than common criminals.” *” 
So, when the price of bread rises, or when the London 
fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit that they are “all 
poor and caitiffs on account of their own simplicity, and 
if they would act on his advice they would be rich and 
powerful,” *° form a combine, to the great loss and hard- 
ship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not console 
themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply 
and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in the 
approval of all good Christians, they stand the miller in the 
pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of the 
mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the 
sixth commandment, choosing as his text “the words of the 
Book of Proverbs, “Give me neither riches nor poverty, 
but enough for my sustenance.” 


III. THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 


Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic 
thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which 


Py 


56 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in 
prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made 
the age a watershed in economic development. It is evi- 
dent that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on 
one side, intensely conservative. There was no question 
of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. 
In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages 
social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of 
the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The 
official Church, to which independence of thought among 
the lower orders was but little less abhorrent when it re- 
lated to their temporal well-being than when it was con- 
cerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these 
dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with 
a ferocity as relentless as the most savage of the White 
Terrors of modern history has shown to the most formi- 
dable of insurrections. 

Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the 
static view, which regarded the social order as a thing un- 
alterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on 
rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional 
doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labor, 
the hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, there- 
fore, they denounced agitations, like the communal move- 
ment,*°* designed to overturn that natural order, though 
the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of medie- 
val Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent ad- 
vance in civilization. They referred to questions of eco- 
nomic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote 
reforms, but because they were concerned with the main- 
tenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of 
which economic conduct formed an important part. 

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, 
implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on 
the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest 


THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 57 


of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal 
structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest 
of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royal- 
ties. The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who 
dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain 
St. Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that 
doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too 
closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the 
princes of the Christian Church. 

The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under 
which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths 
of the population consisted of agriculturists, had been 
serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century 
with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, con- 
servative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies 
of a vanished age, which “knyt suche a knott of colaterall 
amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde 
tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe 
loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the 
father.” *°* Their idealization of the past is as misleading, 
as an account of the conditions of previous centuries, as it 
is illuminating as a comment upon those of their own. 
_In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the 
bulk of medieval agricuiturists, were concerned, the golden 
age of peasant prosperity is, except here and there, a ro- 
mantic myth, at which no one would have been more sur- 
prised than the peasants themselves. The very essence of 
feudal property was exploitation in its fnost naked and 
shameless form, compulsory labor, additional corvées at 
the very moments when the peasant’s labor was most ur- 
gently needed on his own holding, innumerable dues and 
payments, the obligation to grind at the lord’s mill and 
bake at the lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s 
court. The custom of the manor, the scarcity of labor, 
and, in England, the steadily advancing encroachments of 


58 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


the royal courts, blunted the edge of the system, and in 
fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeomanry was ris- 
ing on its ruins. But, during the greater part of the Mid- 
dle Ages, its cumulative weight had been, nevertheless, im- 
mense, Those who lived under it had no illusions as to its 
harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved 
a little money took was to buy himself out of the obliga- 
tion to work on the lord’s demesne. ‘The Peasants’ Revolt 
in England, the Jacquerie in France and the repeated ris- 
ings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social ex- 
asperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few 
subsequent movements. 

It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval 
economics refrain from asking) what the attitude of re- 
ligious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly 
possible to answer that question except by saying that, 
apart from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion 
ignored it. True, the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, 
and urged that the serf should be treated with humanity. 
True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of 
piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not “living 
tools,” but men; in the eyes of God all men are serfs to- 
gether, conservi, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus 
is before Dives.°° True, villeinage was a legal, not an 
economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth cen- 
tury there were serfs who were rich men. But to release 
the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever 
“mad priests’ might say and do, the official Church, whose 
wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circum- 
spection. 

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced 
serfdom.*°° Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pro- 
nouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the result’ 
of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on eco- 
nomic grounds.*°’ Almost all medieval writers appear ta 


THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 59 


assume it or excuse it. Lcclesiastical landlords, though 
perhaps somewhat more conservative in their methods, seem 
as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other 
landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens, 
Was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be 
feared, to the children of light concerned with rent rolls 
and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, 
with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were 
inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John 
Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may 
be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court 
rolls of an abbot of St. Albans, and cut off the head of 
an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot of 
Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in 
plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, 
but revolting peasants in Germany and England, who ap- 
pealed to the fact that “‘Christ has made all men free’’;*°* 
and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed 
small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom— 
and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late 
in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nine- 
teenth—was part of a general economic movement, with 
which the Church had little to do, and which churchmen, 
as property-owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less / 
to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of he 
French Revolution. 

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church 
closed its mouth. The Church of the third century, a 
minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, 
might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven 
was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, 
not as a society, but as society itself, it was inevitably 
diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was a 
compromise—a compromise of which the critic can say, 
“How much that was intolerable was accepted!” and the 


60 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


eulogist, “How much that was intolerable was softened!” 

Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opin- 
ion acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit 
of mind which made the medieval Church almost impotent 
when dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land 
system was precisely that which made it strong, at least 
in theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the 
individual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the 
protection of peaceful labor, for the care of the poor, the 
unfortunate and the oppressed—for the ideal, at least, of 
social solidarity against the naked force of violence and 
oppression. With the growing complexity of economic 
civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily han- 
dled by its traditional categories. But, if applied capri- 
ciously, they were not renounced, and the world of economic 
morality, which baffles us today, was in its turn converted 
by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity. What- 
ever emphasis may be laid—and emphasis can hardly be too 
strong—upon, the gulf between theory and practice, the 
qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by 
which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers, 
was disfigured, the endeavor to draw the most common- 
place of human activities and the least tractable of human 
appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal sys- 
tem still glows through it all with a certain tarnished splen- 
dor. When the distinction between that which is permis- 
sible in private life and that which is permissible in busi- 
ness offers so plausible an escape from the judgment pro- 
nounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted 
that the law of charity is binding on the second not less 
than on the first. When the austerity of principles can be 
evaded by treating them as applicable only to those rela- 
tions of life in which their application is least exacting, 
it is something to have attempted to construct a system 
tough enough to stand against commercial unscrupulous- 


THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 61 


ness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate 
transaction. If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of 
avarice and greed in high places, it is not less important 
to observe that men called these vices by their right names, 
and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was 
enterprise and avarice economy. 

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising 
that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a 
generation disillusioned with free competition, and dis- 
posed to demand some criterion of social expediency more 
cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cyn- 
ical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the preva- 
lent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it 
was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, 
as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is con- 
cerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to 
be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth cen- 
tury, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry 
by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair 
wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and 
textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a 
little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches 
questions of economic organization appears to have more 
affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the un- 
charitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, 
than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent 
grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible 
hand. 

The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superfi- 
cial, and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to 
precisely those elements in medieval thought which were 
most characteristic. The significance of. its contribution 
consists, not in its particular theories as to prices and in- 
terest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances 
of the economic environment expose consumer and _bor- 


62 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 


rower to extortion, but in its insistence that society is a 
spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that eco- 
nomic activity, which is one subordinate element within a 
vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and re- 
pressed by reference to the moral ends for which it sup- 
plies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of 
economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the 
empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which con- 
fines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the 
master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as 
among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent ele- 
ment in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear 
today as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an un- 
mixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expe- 
diency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, 
for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual 
desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the me- 
dieval theorist meant. by “natural law.” 

When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale 
involved, the problem of. moralizing economic life was 
faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been 
impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited 
by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who 
preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it 
had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility 
of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its prac- 
tical results. The best proof of the appeal which the at- 
tempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had 
made is the persistence of the same attempt among reform- 
ers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law 
an abomination and the horror of decent men when, in the 
sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be 
contested. 


CHAPTER II 


THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, 
ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or 
seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.” 

Bucer, De Regno Christi. 


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CHAPTER II 
THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


Lorp Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural 
Lecture on the Study of History, has said that “after many 
ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dis- 
solution of society, and governed by usage and the will of 
masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went 
forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with 
hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.” * His ref- 
erence was to the new world revealed by learning, by sci- 
ence, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate 
text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the 
relations between religion and secular interests which took 
place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the 
emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, 
of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of 
economic thought. 

The strands in this movement were complex, and the for- 
mula which associates the Reformation with the rise of eco- 
nomic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems 
prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of 
petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in 
the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply de- 
fined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and 
flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of 
novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the 
revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the 
partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the 


arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the 
65 


66 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


effect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes 
making the age a watershed, from which new streams of 
social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does 
not reflect upon questions of economic and social organiza- 
tion until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some 
practical emergency{ The sixteenth century was an age of 
social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth 
—because it was an age of social dislocation.4 The retort of 
conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to 
them the triumph of Mammon produces the last great liter- 
ary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which 
had been made by an older social order. The practical 1m- 
plications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated 
more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, 
because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which 
is menaced. 


I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 


The religious revolution of the age came on a world heay- 
ing with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had ex- 
perienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curios- 
ity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the schol- 
arship which explored the past and the prophetic vision 
which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into 
the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the 
genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects there 
moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon 
whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth cir- 
cle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter 
three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with 
fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth la- 
bors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, 
and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the 
walls to be adorned by Raphael. 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 67 


For it was the mastery of man over his environment 
which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the 
stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery 
was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, 
the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few 
favored spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. 
Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and dis- 
ciplined ; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be 
merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched 
from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to 
Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. 
The general who marshaled the host and launched the at- 
tack was economic power. 

' Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking 
through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, 
for a century before, with the climax of the great Discov- 
eries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as 
a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the con- 
ventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its 
economic significance. It was in an age of political anarchy 
that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their 
wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared 
by the patient labor of Italian cartographers and Portuguese 
seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by 
the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors. 

The master who set the problem that the heroes of the 
age were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the 
earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, 
had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the 
growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; 
and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a 
single economic system, has no space left for fresh expan- 
sion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its imme- 
morial pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the 
wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the 


68 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on 
its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a 
wall. 

As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic 
in its external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its in- 
ternal, relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and 
the village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified 
by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity 
the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine 
with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village 
lay the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, 
and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the for- 
eign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above 
both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an 
economic force before nationality was a political fact, and 
it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he 
was a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged 
colony with its depot, the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic 
League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the 
Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but 
tiny breaches in a wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, 
as in modern Turkey or China, was carried on under capit- 
ulations. 

This narrow framework had been a home. In the fif- 
teenth century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding ener- 
gies pressed against the walls; restless appetites gnawed 
and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered room 
for erosion. Long before the southward march of the 
Turks cut the last of the great routes from the East, the 
Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before 
the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded 
Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol 
were yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, 
which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst.7 It was not 


/ 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 69 


the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, 
who in England first nibbled at commons and undermined 
the manorial custom, behind which, as behind a dyke, their 
small savings had been accumulated. It was not great cap- 
italists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the 
control of the fraternity the basis of a system of pluto- 
cratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious individualists, 
from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might 
grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was 
not even the Discoveries which first began the enormous 
tilt of economic power from south and east to north and 
west. The records of German and English trade suggest 
that the powers of northern Europe had for a century be- 
fore the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civiliza- 
tion,® and for a century after them English economic de- 
velopment was to be as closely wedded to its continental 
connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, 
nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores 
of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise 
to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever 
greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his 
strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Dis- 
coveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the 
disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax 
of almost a century of patient economic effort. They were 
as practical in their motive as the steam-engine. 

The result was not the less sensational because it had 
been long prepared{_Heralded by an economic revolution 
not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new 
world of the sixteenth century took its character from the 
outburst of economic energy in which it had been born 
Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth 
and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of 
financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid 


70 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression 
of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas 
amid struggles not less bitter. 

It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sen- 
sations, which were recorded in the letter-books * of busi- 
ness men as well as in the state papers of Governments. 
The decline of Venice and of the south German cities which 
had distributed the products that Venice imported, and 
which henceforward must either be marooned far from the 
new trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them 
did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic im- 
perialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist 
enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial 
companies, no longer local but international, and based, not 
merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed 
capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors ; a revo- 
lution in prices which shattered all customary relationships ; 
the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of 
peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial 
organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power ; the 
triumph of the State and its conquest, in great parts of 
Europe, of the Church—all were crowded into less than 
two generations. A man who was born when the Council 
of Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, 
the dissolution of the English monasteries. At the first 
date Portuguese explorers had hardly passed Sierra Leone; 
at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian 
Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three- 
quarters of a century the whole framework of European 
civilization had been transformed. 

Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Ger- 
many, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic 
back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred 
by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When 
Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 71 


of the country differed but little from that of the age 
of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, 
some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish 
it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could al- 
ready, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained 
to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later 
the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun. 

The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the 
swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then 
of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not dis- 
cerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an am- 
bassador of that commercial republic, in comparison with 
whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were 
meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines of the 
Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay 
of the water-logged Netherlands.° The justice of the criti- 
cism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back 
of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, 
completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, 
far more than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. 
But the beginnings of that long agony, in which the power- 
house of European enterprise was to be struck with paraly- 
sis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards 
looked back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing 
years of Charles V as a golden age of economic prosperity. 
Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political and re- 
ligious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing 
of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later 
Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting strug- 
gle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her 
own waste places. That tremendous achievement almost 
accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing the 
world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase 
of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four 
hundred years, and which only in the twentieth century was_ 


a THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


to show signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year 
she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year 
she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The 
period of mere experiment over, and the new connections 
firmly established, she appeared to be in sight of an economic 
stability based on broader foundations than ever before. 

Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house 
of East and West. But it was not Portugal, with her tiny 
population, and her empire that was little more than a 
line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, 
for centuries an army on the march, and now staggering be- 
neath the responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, 
devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic 
affairs which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the ma- 
terial harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, 
the one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils 
which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which 
slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the 
political agents of minds more astute and characters better 
versed in the arts of peace. Every period and society has 
some particular center, or institution, or social class, in 
which the characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be 
fixed and embodied. In the Europe of the early Renais- 
sance the heart of the movement had been Italy. In the 
Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The 
economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The 
institution which best symbolized its eager economic ener- 
gies was the international money-market and produce-ex- 
change. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was 
the international financier. 

Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and 
war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarna- 
tion in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer 
untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism 
of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 73 


pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of 
that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the 
international idea when outlawed by every other power in 
Europe, Antwerp, ‘“‘a home common to all nations,’”’ was the 
most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a center of learn- 
ing by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a coun- 
try where painting was almost a national industry, it was 
at once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Durer and 
Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum 
which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a ha- 
ven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp 
out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in 
the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the re- 
former found a spiritual home, where the energies of the 
new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of hap- 
piness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew 
his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden 
of his lodgings at Antwerp. 

The economic preeminence of Antwerp owed much to 
the industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and 
worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of 
Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the muni- 
tions of the Black Country round Liége, poured in an un- 
ceasing stream on to its quays.° But Antwerp was a Euro- 
pean, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competi- 
tor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of 
trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in 
the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth cen- 
tury she had crushed her rival. The Hanse League main- 
tained a depot at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increas- 
ing numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant 
Adventurers made it the entrepot through which English 
cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern 
Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp 
in the nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Ant- 


74 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


werp, the first city to tap the wealth, not of an inland sea, 
but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged 
preéminence almost unique in European history. The long 
sea-roads which ran east and west met and ended in its har- 
bors. The Portuguese Government made it in 1503 the 
depét of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of 
Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Em- 
pire, and, in spite of protests that the precious metals were 
leaving Spain, the market for American silver. Com- 
merce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought 
finance in its train. The commercial companies and bank- 
ing houses of south Germany turned from the dwindling 
trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for finan- 
cial operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.’ 

In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of 
society, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. 
Professor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook of the medie- 
val middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and 
local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the six- 
teenth century, with its international ramifications, its in- 
dependence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindi- 
cation of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the 
artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own 
career. “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants 
at Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to 
interfere with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the 
cause of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted 
to those who trade there.” ° Swept into wealth on the crest 
of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century 
before would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the lib- 
eral bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all prec- 
edents, a policy of practical individualism, which would 
have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms 
with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian mon- 
archy, which were fought by their more conservative neigh- 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 75 


bors, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, wel- 
coming the technical improvements which elsewhere were 
resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds, and 
throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Exchange, 
with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum 
cuiusque gentis ac linguae. 

For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the 
soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its 
Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as 
characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial 
capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted 
partly in the mere expansion in the scale of commercial en- 
terprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance the 
movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such 
as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the im- 
pecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it 
was still on the water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, 
the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English 
Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the 
rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the 
growth of an international banking system mobilized im- 
mense resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp 
was the capital of the European money-market, the bill on 
Antwerp was the commonest form of international cur- 
rency. Linked together by the presence in each of the 
great financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds 
pouring in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading 
ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, 
speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested 
by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and 
Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, 
Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the 
century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a 
financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of 
the present day. They formed together the departments of 


70 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


an international clearing-house, where bills could be read- 
ily discounted, drafts on any important city could be ob- 
tained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nation- 
__ality changed hands.*° 
_ Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the 
financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, 
if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it 
seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Men- 
aced with an accession of riches which would lighten its 
toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away 
the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the 
complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the 
new resources commanded by Europe during the first half 
of the sixteenth century might have done something to 
exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise 
the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. 
Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought other- 
wise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be neces- 
sities imposed by nature, they reéstablished them by politi- 
cal art. 

The sluice which they opened to drain away each new 
accession of superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” 
wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle alone has 
seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not 
musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful 
to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing 
harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it.” ** The 
words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too pro- 
phetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the six- 
teenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself 
to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of 
Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out be- 
neath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the 
vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and pos- 
ture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most de- 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 77 


spairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the 
sixteenth century the English Government, after an orgy 
of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial 
collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Nether- 
lands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, in- 
cluding the financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were 
ruined. By the middle of the seventeenth century wide 
tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the 
French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that 
from which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius 
of Colbert. The victors compared their position with that 
of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their 
spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would 
have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, 
but only peace. 

It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, 
on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability 
to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a 
scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the 
age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and can- 
non. The centralized States which were rising in the age 
of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate 
financial situation. It sprang from the combination of 
modern administrative and military methods with medieval 
systems of finance.. They entrusted to bureaucracies work 
which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident 
of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. 
They were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, 
involving the use of masses of professional infantry and 
artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspira- 
tion of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of print- 
ing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly 
capitalized industry. Government after Government, un- 
deterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its neigh- 
bors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which 


78 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, 
only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or 
Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maximilian. 
They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold 
offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the tax- 
payer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered 
the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property which 
should have been treated as capital. They parted with 
Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their suc- 
cessors. 

These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. 
What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money- 
market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or 
later all States came. Their dependence on the financier 
was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not 
less disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the 
great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the 
new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince 
was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, financing im- 
partially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, 
Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German 
banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who 
played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in 
war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality 
typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince. Com- 
pared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and 
Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money- 
power to which political struggles were irrelevant except 
as an opportunity for gain. 

The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly 
in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of 
financial connections that were making Europe an economic 
unity. The range of interests in which the German bank- 
ing houses were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had 
invested in the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East In- 


THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 79 


dies, financed an expedition, half commercial, half military, 
to Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade be- 
tween Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners 
in silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and 
had establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but 
in the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. 
The careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Im- 
hofs were much the same. The Fuggers, thanks to judi- 
cious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous conces- 
sions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts 
drawn by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and 
quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and 
commercial ‘businesses in Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp. 
They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Branden- 
burg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending 
their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise 
money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds; pro- 
vided the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial 
crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of an 
auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, 
when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker 
rating a necessitous client ; and found the money with which 
Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The 
head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse 
for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He 
died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count 
of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per cent. for the 
preceding sixteen years.” 


II. LUTHER 


Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, 
the economic revolution which accompanied the Renatis- 
sance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Ger- 
many and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of 


80 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercan- 
tilist thinkers resharpened an old economic weapon for the 
armory of princes, Objective economic analysis, still in its 
infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of 
practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the 
foreign exchanges. 

The question of the attitude which religious opinion 
would assume towards these new forces was momentous. 
It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an in- 
strument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled 
in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce 
it as a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers 
who had turned with a shudder from the material triumphs 
of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding ener- 
gies to its own conception of man’s spiritual end, like the 
Schoolmen who had stretched old formulz to cover the new 
forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore 
them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only 
beginning to emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical 
framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic 
treatment of economic questions was still that contained in 
the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce 
judgment on problems of property and contract with the 
same assurance as on problems of theology. 

Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and 
defy its conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they 
attacked the assumption that questions of economic con- 
duct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. 
Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable 
complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which 
pious merchants propounded in the confessional. The Span- 
ish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly 
prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential 
to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in 
order to consult the theologians of the University as to the 


LUTHER 81 


compatibility of speculative exchange business with the 
canon law.** When Eck, later famous as the champion 
who crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy, in or- 
der to seek from the University of Bologna authoritative 
confirmation of his daring argument that interest could 
lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no 
less a group of capitalists than the great house of Fugger 
thought it worth while to finance an expedition undertaken 
in quest of so profitable a truth.** 

Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an im- 
mense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of 
industry, and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a 
scale unknown before, the new economic civilization inevi- 
tably gave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, 
since both the friends and the enemies of the Reformation 
identified it with social change, the leaders in the religious 
struggle were the protagonists in the debate. In Germany, 
where social revolution had been fermenting for half a cen- 
tury, it seemed at last to have come. The rise in prices, an 
enigma which baffled contemporaries till Bodin published 
his celebrated tract in 1569,*° produced a storm of indigna- 
tion against monopolists. Since the rising led by Hans 
Boheim in 1476, hardly a decade had passed without a peas- 
ants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and 
peasant, had become a battle-cry. From city after city mu- 
nicipal authorities, terrified by popular demands for the re- 
pression of the extortioner, consulted universities and di- 
vines as to the legitimacy of interest, and universities and 
divines gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response. 
Melanchthon expounded godly doctrine on the subject of 
money-lending and prices.*® Calvin wrote a famous letter on 
usury and delivered sermons on the same subject.” Bucer 
sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a Christian 
prince.*® Bullinger produced a classical exposition of so- 
cial ethics in the Decades which he dedicated to Edward VI.** 


82 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


Luther preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,”” 
and said that it was time “‘to put a bit in the mouth of the 
holy company of the Fuggers.”** Zwingli and Cécolam- 
padius devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief. 
Above all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the 
Gospel and its frightful catastrophe, not only terrified Lu- 
ther into his outburst: ‘“Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, 
or stab, secretly or publicly . . . such wonderful times are 
these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed 
than another with prayer’; ** it also helped to stamp on Lu- 
theranism an almost servile reliance on the secular authori- 
ties. In England there was less violence, but hardly less 
agitation, and a similar flood of writing and preaching. 
Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel— 
to mention but the best-known names—all contributed to the 
debate.** Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth 
century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social 
teaching on the part of men of religion. If the world could 
be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a 
Paradise. 

That the problems of a swiftly changing economic en- 
vironment should have burst on Europe at a moment when 
it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever 
before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the 
tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory 
did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and 
the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Ger- 
many and in England, is its conservatism. Where ques- 
tions of social morality were involved, men whose names 
are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with hardly an 
exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to medieval authori- 
ties, and reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the 
Schoolmen. 

A view of the social history of the sixteenth century 
which has found acceptance in certain quarters has repre- 


LUTHER 83 


sented the Reformation as the triumph of the commercial 
spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. 
Something like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 
1540 Cranmer wrote to Oziander protesting against the em- 
barrassment caused to reformers in England by the indul- 
gence to moral laxity, in the matter alike of economic 
transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given by reform- 
ers in Germany.’ By the seventeenth century the hints had 
become a theory and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin 
and Bucer with being the first theologians to defend extor- 
tion,”® and it only remained for a pamphleteer to adapt they 
indictment to popular consumption, by writing bluntly that 
‘it grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of heresy.” *? 
That the revolt from Rome synchronized, both in Germany 
and in England, with a period of acute social distress is un- 
deniable, nor is any long argument needed to show that, 
like other revolutions, it had its seamy side. What is some- 
times suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of 
religious and economic movements, but a logical connection 
between changes in economic organization and changes in 
religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad social prac- 
tice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious 
innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly 
teach a congcienceless individualism, individualism was, at 
least, the natural corollary of their teaching. In the eight- 
eenth century, which had as little love for the commercial 
restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as for their 
political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our 
own day, the wheel seems almost to have come full circle. 
What was then a matter for congratulation is now often an 
occasion for criticism. There are writers by whom the Ref- 
ormation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of unscrupu- 
lous commercialism, which had previously been held in 
check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the Church. 

», These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the 


ie 


84 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


grand religious struggles of the age have their significance. 
But the obiter dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw 
more light on the temper of the combatants than on the 
substance of their contentions, and the issues were too com- 
plex to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses 
which appealed to partisans. (If capitalism means the di-. 
rection of industry by the owners of capital for their own 
pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which establish 
themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariat 
whom they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand 
scale both in medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If. 
by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is pre- 
pared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, 
it had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the 
Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic 
Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, 
achievements of the Protestant powers, which impressed 
contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predomi- 
nantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals 
of Europe, and Catholic bankers who were its leading finan- 
ciers, 

Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked 
with indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on 
economic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the 
Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent 
of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and 
economic issues, it did so without design, and against the 
intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensa- 
tional the innovations in economic practice which accom- 
panied the expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth 
century, the development of doctrine on the subject of eco- 
nomic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is ex- 
amined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the 
view that the stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice 
of the religious revolution. To think of the abdication of 


LUTHER 85 


religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity 
and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from 
Rome, is to antedate a movement which was not finally 
accomplished for another century and a half, and which 
owed as much to changes in economic and political organi- 
zation, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious 
thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all 
shades of opinion still searched the Bible, the Fathers and 
the Corpus Juris Canonict for light on practical questions of 
social morality, and, as far as the first generation of re- 
formers was concerned, there was no intention, among either 
Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules 
of good conscience, which were supposed to control eco- 
nomic transactions and social relations. If anything, in- 
deed, their tendency was to interpret them with a more rig- 
orous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the 
Renaissance, and, in particular, against the avarice which 
was thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the pas- 
sion for regeneration and purification, which was one ele- 
ment in the Reformation, was directed against the corrup- 
tions of society as well as of the Church. Princes and nobles 
and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and 
fished eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious 
leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and eccle- 
siastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a 
pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive 
Christianity. 

The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden 
age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement, 
and its most artless, expression in the writings of the Ger- 
man reformers, Like the return to nature in the eighteenth 
century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society dis- 
illusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex 
civilization. The prosperity of Augsburg, Nurnberg, Reg- 
ensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like 


86 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of 
all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across 
the Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central posi- 
tion, which they were to lose when the spice trade moved 
to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the 
creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made 
Germany again the entrepot between western Europe and 
Russia, Austria, Italy and the near East. But the expan- 
sion of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer 
bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of an 
acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and 
popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Ger- 
many from a highway into a back-water. The economic 
aspect of the development was the rise to a position of 
overwhelming preeminence of the new interests based on 
the control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle 
Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally of the personal 
labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the 
fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be 
a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate 
and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predom- 
inant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance 
with its own exacting requirements. 

Under the impact of these new forces, while the institu- 
tions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and oper- 
ation were transformed. In the larger cities the gild or- 
ganization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the cap- 
italist, became one of the instruments which he used to con- 
solidate his power. The rules of fraternities masked a divi- 
sion of the brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, shel- 
tered behind barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman 
could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for 
their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their mas- 
ters, and alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever- 
expanding morass of hopeless pauperism.** The peasantry 


LUTHER 87 


suffered equally from the spread of a commercial civiliza- 
tion into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient 
agrarian servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches 
of the towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, 
and drove up rents and fines by their competition. But, 
while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the 
onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not with- 
out success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his 
brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till 
the middle of the nineteenth century, found corvées redou- 
bled, money-payments increased, and common rights cur- 
tailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which 
saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of 
maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing 
wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now 
fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanc- 
tion to its harshest exactions.” 

On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came 
the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. 
Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to eco- 
nomic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social 
problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the 
wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south 
Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, 
to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or 
organized themselves into companies, which handled at Lis- 
bon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be 
undertaken by individual merchants using only their own 
resources. The modern world has seen in America the 
swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by 
the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar move- 
ment took place on the narrower stage of European com- 
merce in the generation before the Reformation. Its center 
was Germany, and it was defended and attacked by argu- 
ments almost identical with those which are familiar today. 


88 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in 
bulk, drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great 
pike swallows up a lot of little fishes,’ and plundered the 
consumer, were the commonplaces of the social reformer.” 
The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger 
of interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by 
the companies. The problem was on several occasions 
brought before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the 
sage who observed that it is not possible to unscrambie 
eggs had already been made, and its decrees, passed in the 
teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, 
do not seem to have been more effective than modern legis- 
lation on the same subject. 

The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such con- 
ditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of 
social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the 
Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.°* In 
the age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in 
his Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all mer- 
chants’ companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstet- 
ters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who 
classed merchants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as 
public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that 
the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should 
be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.*? 

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional 
explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of 
light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle 
to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Com- 
pared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker 
like St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social 
questions make an impression of naiveté, as of an impetuous 
but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous em- 
barrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social 


LUTHER 89 


ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated 
consciousness. 

It was partly that they were piéces de circonstance, thrown 
off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely 
the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested. 
Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and 
financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic 
analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a 
steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel 
curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely en- 
rage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and 
that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of 
iniquity. But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not 
from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, 
but from a conception which made the learning of the 
schools appear trivial or mischievous. 

“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, 
“constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he 
needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from 
Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Para- 
dise.” ** It was this doctrine that all things have their price 
—future salvation as much as present felicity—which scan- 
dalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to est 
Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to 
the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in com- 
mon with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both 
was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before 
the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolu- 
tionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic in- 
dividualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the 
supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society 
by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude | - 
towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks 
at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the 
tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at 


90 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless 
money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking 
business of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of 
Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and 
the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the 
capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the 
seven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and the sword 
which will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the 
Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and be- 
come a congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes 
and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be 
converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient 
cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common 
lot of the descendants of Adam. 

The children of the mind are like the children of the body. 
Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, 
if their parents could foresee their future development, it 
would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has 
earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, 
would have been horrified, could he have anticipated the 
emoter deductions to be derived from his argument. 

amba said that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive 
at all, and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom 
expounded by Luther imposed more social restraints than it 
removed would have more affinity with the thought of 
Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his teach- 
ing a plea for treating questions of economic conduct and 
social organization as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s re- 
volt against authority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on 
its laxity and its corruption. His individualism was not the 
reed of the plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness 
f public authority an opportunity for personal gain. It 

as the ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hun- 
gers for a society in which order and fraternity will reign 
without “the tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law 


LUTHER QI 


and statute,” because they well up in all their native purity? 
from the heart. 

Professor Troeltsch has sainted out that Protestants, 
not less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church- 
civilization, in which all departments of life, the State and} 
society, education and science, law, commerce and indus-} 
try, were to be regulated in accordance with the law of 
God.** That conception dominates all the utterances of 
Luther on social issues. So far from accepting the view 
which was afterwards to prevail, that the world of business 
is a closed compartment with laws of its own, and that the 
religious teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down 
rules for the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves 
for that plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter 
than those directed against Rome. The text of his ad- 
--monitions is always, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that 
of the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a for- 
mal, legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness 
which does not need to be organized by law, because it is the 
spontaneous expression of a habit of love. To restore is to 
destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the 
simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial 
chicaneries of ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came 
in the thunder of revolution. It was the declaration of the 
peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised Mes- 
siah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience 
and concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées, and 
enclosures.*° | 

The practical conclusion to which such premises led was 
a theory of society more medieval than that held by many 
thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commer- 
cial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into J e 
paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly 
a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had 
not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular pro- 





ee, 


92 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


tests against a commercial civilization which were every- 
where in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, 
absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naivete, even 
while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give 
effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reac- 
tion of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the 
sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. 
The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and cap- 
italism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive 
State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. 

For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as 
for the anxious provision which accumulates for the future, 
Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk. Chris- 
tians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow, 
take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust 
Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther 
thought that the most admirable life was that of the peasant, 
for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commer- 
cial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the lesson 
to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.** The 
labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the com- 
munity in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a 
priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined to 
the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands no 
more than will compensate him for his labor and risk. The 
unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they 
destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are mem- 
bers. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome. 
For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who 
lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, 
has fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant 
orders, mischievous alike in their practice and by their ex- 
ample, cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrim- 
ages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness 
and must be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished 


LUTHER 93 


or compelled to labor, and each town must organize charity 
for the support of the honest poor.** =» 
Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles 
of status and subordination, thetigh he knocked away the , 
ecclesiastical rungs in the-ladder.¢ The combination of re- 
ligious radicalism and economic conservatism is not un- 
common, and in the traditional conception of society, as an 
organism of unequal classes with different rights and func- 
tions, the father of all later revolutions found an arsenal of 
arguments against change, which he launched with almost 
equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping mo- 
nopolists.7 His vindication of the spiritual freedom of com- 
mon men, and his outspoken abuse of the German princes, 
had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs groan- 
ing under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising 
came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another 
age, was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to 
him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and 
his own. As fully convinced as any medieval writer that 
serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm 
at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by a political) 


theory which exalted the ahsolutism of secular authorities, ne: 


and a religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis be- _¢g®* 
tween the external order and the life of the spirit. The de-\ ct 
mand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because 
“Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well 

as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His pre- 
cious blood,” ** horrified him, partly as portending an orgy 

of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be confused with 
and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation move- 
ment, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gos- 

pel by turning a spiritual message into a program of a 
cial reconstruction. “This article would make all men equal 
and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an ex- 
ternal worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom can- 






v| 


94 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


not exist without inequality of persons. Some must be 
free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. 
Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’ ” *° 
After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a 
too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear 
somewhat exaggerated. 

A society may perish by corruption as well as by vio- 
lence. Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined; 
and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a 
world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, 
had as little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and 
finance as for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could 
be more striking than that between his social theory and 
the outlook of Calvin. (Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted 
the main institutions of a commercial civilization, and sup- 
plied a creed to the classes which were to dominate the fu- 
ture. The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw no 
room in a Christian society for those middle classes whom 
an English statesman once described as the natural repre- 
sentatives of the human race. International trade, banking 
and credit, capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic 
forces, which, next to his own revolution, were to be the 
mightiest solvent of the medieval world, seem to him to 
belong in their very essence to the kingdom of darkness 
which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority of 
the canon law, only to reaffirm more dogmatically the de- 
tailed rules which it had been used to enforce. When he 
discusses economic questions at length, as in his Long Ser- 
mon on Usury in 1520, or his tract On Trade and Usury in 
1524, his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpre- 
tation of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, unsoftened by the 
qualifications with which canonists themselves had at- 
tempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical 
life. 

In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional 


LUTHER - 95 


doctrines. “A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares 
as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is 
right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that 
is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, 
as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But be- 
cause thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy 
neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and con- 
science that thou mayest practice it without harm or in- 
jury to him.” *° If a price is fixed by public authority, the 
seller must keep to it. If it is not, he must follow the price 
of common estimation. If he has to determine it himself, 
he must consider the income needed to maintain him in his 
station in life, his labor, and his risk, and must settle it ac- 
cordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise 
it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in 
futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments. 
On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than 
the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to 
practical necessities made by the canonists. “The greatest 
misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in in- 
terest... . The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving 
his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the 
world.” * Not content with insisting that lending ought 
to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compen- 
sation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, 
both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would 
refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian bur- 
ial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the 
characteristic developments of his generation—the luxury 
trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the 
exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking beyond 
~ measure. ‘Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut 
and India and the like places wares such as precious silver 
and jewels and spices . . . and drain the land and people of 
their money, should not be permitted. . . . Of combina- 


96 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


tions I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless 
and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong. . . . Who 
is so stupid as not to see that combinations are mere out- 
right monopolies, which even heathen civil laws—I will say 
nothing of divine right and Christian law—condemn as a 
plainly harmful thing in all the world?’ * 

So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected 
to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed 
that Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, 
would have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least 
in theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, 
of course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesias- 
tical jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite. It was 
one, not merely of indifference, but of repugnance. The 
prophet who scourged with whips the cupidity of the in- 
dividual chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed 
upon it by society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian 
love turned a shattering dialectic on the corporate organi- 
zation of the Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic 
a parody of human hopes are human institutions, there have 
been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost 
everything that men have done or made. Of that temper 
Luther, who lived at a time when the contrast between a 
sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been intoler- 
able, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless char- 
ity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by 
which an attempt had been made to give it a concrete ex- 
pression. He reiterates the content of medieval economic 
teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers 
of the later Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in 
which it had received a positive, if sadly imperfect, expres- 
sion, he has little but abhorrence. God speaks to the soul, 
not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social in- 
stitutions built up by man, but solus cum solo, as a voice 
in the heart and in the heart alone. Thus the bridges be- 


LUTHER 97 


tween the worlds of spirit and of sense are broken, and the 
soul is isolated from the society of men, that it may enter 
into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely . 
bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but 
those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourish- 
ment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the pri- 
meval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his 
fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilder- 
ness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of 
contributing to sanctification. “It is certain that absolutely 
none among outward things, under whatever name they 
may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian 
righteousness or liberty. . . . One thing, and one alone, is 
necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and 
that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.” * 

The difference between loving men as a result of first 
loving God, and learning to love God through a growing 
love for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound. To 
Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, 
in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For 
carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical re- 
sult, the argument made, not only good works, but sacra- 
ments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of 
the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and 
of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther 
reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects 
on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is be- 
stowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that 
alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had 
mediated between the individual soul and its Maker—di- 
-vinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, 
corporate institutions—drops away, as the blasphemous triv- 
ialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of 
the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articu-. 
lated organism of members contributing in their different 


98 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences 
which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now 
- set in irreconcilable antagonism to each-other. Grace no 
longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s 
actions as a member of society were no longer the exten- 
sion of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. 
Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious 
significance: they might compete with religion, but they 
could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian 
casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has 
a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In 
one sense, the distinction between the secular and the re- 
ligious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secu- 
larized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing 
towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ 
of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else 
seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction be- 
came more profound than ever before. For, though all 
might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could 
partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good 
and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The divi- 
sion between them was absolute ; no human effort could span 
the chasm. 

The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be 
stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not 
consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain 
the content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its 
sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the 
fruit of salvation as vehemently as he denied that they 
could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social 
questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality 
is combined with a repudiation of its visible and institu- 
tional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results 
between spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, 
his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good 


LUTHER 99 


conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an 
immense effort of simplification. His denunciation off 
medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals 
and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses, 
sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that 
merit could be acquired by the operation of some special } 
machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordi- 
nary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of 
the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that 
the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not 
rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient 
of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mech- 
anism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects 
it. He has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him 
listen to them, “There can be no better instructions in 

. all transactions in temporal goods than that every 
man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself 
these commandments: ‘What ye would that others should 
do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor 
as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything 
would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor 
courts nor judicial actions would be required; all things 
would quietly and simply be set to rights, for every one's 
heart and conscience would guide him.” * 

“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. 
But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate sub- 
stitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to 
solve the problem which social duties present to the individ- 
ual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is 
true that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it 
‘necessarily follow that the external order is simply irrelevant 
to it?. To wave aside the world of institutions and law as 
alien to that of the spirit—is not this to abandon, instead of 
facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for 
which medieval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy 


100 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


of values related to a common end, had attempted, however 
inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist 
had answered by anticipation Luther’s contemptuous dis- 
missal of law and learning, when he urged that it was use- 
less for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was pre- 
pared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the 
transactions to which the prohibition applied.** It was a pity 
that Pecock’s douche of common sense was not of a kind 
which could be appreciated by Luther. He denounced cov- 
etousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of 
invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on 
the specific question whether the authorities of Dantzig 
shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. “The 
preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to 
each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can 
receive it, receive it; he cannot be compelled thereto further 
than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the rahe of 
God urges forward.” * 

Luther’s impotence was not accidental. It sprang di- 
rectly from his fundamental conception that to externalize 
religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He at- 
tacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in theit 
teaching with regard to which his criticism was justified 
were only too numerous. But the remedy for bad law is 
good law, not lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the ap- 
plication of general principles to particular cases, which is 
involved in any living system of jurisprudence, whether ec- 
clesiastical or secular. If the principles are not to be ap- 
plied, on ‘the ground that they are too sublime to be soiled 
by contact with the gross world of business and politics, 
what remains of them? Denunciations such as Luther 
launched against the Fuggers and the peasants; aspirations 
for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as he 
advanced in his tract On Trade and Usury. Pious rhetoric 


LUTHER IOI 


may be edifying, but it is hardly the panoply recommended 
by St. Paul. 

‘As the soul needs the word alone for life and justifica- 
tion, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. 
. . . Lherefore the first care of every Christian ought to 
be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his 
faith alone more and more.” ** The logic of Luther’s re- 
ligious premises was more potent for posterity than his at- 
tachment to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its own 
inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously 
deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from 
which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring. 
But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dual- 
ism which, as its implications were developed, emptied re- 
ligion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between 
light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb 
upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation 
and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere 
heights where alone true faith is found, no human institu- 
tion can avail to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the 
fate of only too many. 

He himself was conscious that he had left the world of 
secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual re- 
straints. He met the difficulty, partly with an admission 
that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the ma- 
jestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose 
decrees might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, 
be obeyed; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the 
province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could 
find no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked, ‘Who 
then can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For 
in this fashion no merchandising would remain on. earth.’ 
... You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people 
on earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in 
the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and 


| 


102 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No 
one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. 
The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.” * 

Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, 
expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon 
the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to 
be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities 
to the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of 
unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry 
VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that 
rare monster, the God-fearing Prince. 


TIT. CALVIN 


The most characteristic and influential form of Protes- 
tantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is 
that which descends, by one path or another, from the 
teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which 
it sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in differ- 
ent countries, became an international movement, which 


| brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was 


strewn with revolutions. .Where Lutheranism had been so- 
cially conservative, deferential to established political au- 
thorities, the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, 
piety, Calvinism was an active and radical force. It was a 
creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but 


penetrating every department of life, public as well as pri- 
vate, with the influence of religion. 

Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this 
is not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory 
of society, it possessed from the beginning one characteris- 
tic which was both novel and important. It assumed an 
economic organization which was relatively advanced, and 
expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this re- 


_ #o reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by 
j 


CALVIN 103 


spect the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most 
directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both 
of medieval theologians and of Luther. The difference is 
not merely one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane 
on which the discussion is conducted. The background, 
not only of most medieval social theory, but also of 
Luther and his English contemporaries, is the traditional 
stratification of rural society. It is a natural, rather than 
a money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of peas- 
ants and craftsmen in the small market town, where indus- 
try is carried on for the subsistence of the household and 
the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the produc- 
tion of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional 
incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole sys- 
tem in motion. When they criticize economic abuses, it is 
precisely against departures from that natural state of things 
—against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless com- 
petition, which disturb the stability of the existing order 
with clamorous economic appetites—that their criticism is 
directed. 

These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of 
unscrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on 
the writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example, 
who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between Lu-. 
ther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that pri- 
vate property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can} 
hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Coun- 
cils of Constance and Basel—“‘assembled, forsooth, at the 
bidding of the Holy Ghost’”—for showing indulgence to 
the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while 
emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanc- 
tions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of 
God.*® Of the attempts made at Zurich and Geneva to re- 
press extortion something is said below. But these full- 
blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by 


104 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the 
duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation 
by which interest was permitted, and already, when they 
were uttered, they had ceased to represent the conclusion of 
the left wing of the Reformed Churches. 

For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began 
their voyage lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who 
saw economic life with the eyes of a peasant and a mystic, 

oO \ they approached it as men of affairs, disposed neither to 
idealize the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, 
nor to regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist en- 
terprise in commerce and finance. Like early Christianity 
and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban 
movement ; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from 
country to country partly by emigrant traders and work- 
men; and its stronghold was precisely in those social groups 
to which the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its 
treatment of economic interests as a quite minor aspect of 
human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. 
As was to be expected in the exponents of a faith which had 
its headquarters at Geneva, and later its most influential ad- 
herents in great business centers, like Antwerp with its in- 
dustrial hinterland, London, and Amsterdam, its leaders ad- 
dressed their teaching, not of course exclusively, but none 
the less primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and in- 
dustry, who formed the most modern and progressive ele- 
ments in the life of the age. 

In doing so they naturally started from a frank recogni- 
tion of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large- 
scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of 
business life. They thus broke with the tradition which, 
regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond 
what is necessary for subsistence’ as reprehensible, had 
stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a 
thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to 


CALVIN 105 


the medieval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty es- 
caped censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of re- 
spectability as the earnings of the laborer and the rents of 
the landlord. ‘‘What reason is there,’ wrote Calvin to a 
correspondent, “why the income from business should not 
be larger than that from land-owning? Whence do the 
merchant’s profits come, except from his own diligence and 
industry?’ °° It was quite in accordance with the spirit of 
those words that Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds 
and avarice of merchants, should urge the English Govern- 
ment to undertake the development of the woollen indus- 
try on mercantilist lines.”* 

Since it is the environment of the industrial and com- 
mercial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin 
and his followers, they have to make terms with its prac- 
tical necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of 
religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which 
they are concerned to moralize is one in which the main 
features of a commercial civilization are taken for granted, 
and that it is for application to such conditions that their 
teaching is designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has 
its own rule, and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of eco- 
nomic affairs. But it no longer suspects the whole world of | 
economic motives as alien to the life of the spirit, or dis- 
trusts the capitalist as one who has necessarily grown rich 
on the misfortunes of his neighbor, or regards poverty as 
in itself meritorious, and it is perhaps the first systematic 
body of religious teaching which can be said to recognize 
and applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy is not the ac- 
cumulation of riches, but their misuse for purposes of self- 
indulgence or ostentation. Its ideal is a society which seeks 
wealth with the-sober gravity of men who are conscious at 
once of disciplining their own characters by patient labor, 
and of devoting themselves to a service acceptable to God. 

It is in the light of that change of social perspective that 


pda 


106 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is 
to be interpreted. Its significance consisted, not in the phase 
which it marked in the technique of economic analysis, but 
in its admission to a new position of respectability of a 
powerful and growing body of social interests, which, how- 
ever irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by 
religious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at 
worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous 
pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor _ 
than by its indulgence. ‘Calvin,’ wrote an English divine 
a generation after his death, ‘deals with usurie as the apoth- 
ecarie doth with poyson.’” *? The apologetic was just, for 
neither his letter to Gécolampadius, nor his sermon on the 
same subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of 
the financier. That interest is lawful, provided that it does 
not exceed an official maximum, that, even when a maximum 
is fixed, loans must be made gratis to the poor, that the 
borrower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that 
excessive security must not be exacted, that what is venial 
as an occasional expedient is reprehensible when carried on. 
as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic 
gain for himself to the injury of his neighbor—a condona- 
tion of usury protected by such embarrassing entanglements 
can have offered but tepid consolation to the devout money- 


lender. 


Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor 
might properly be asked to concede some small part of 
his profits to the creditor with whose capital they had been 
earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it 
meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the 
debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his la- 
bor.” There have been ages in which such doctrines would 
have been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather 
than as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin’s specific contri- 
butions to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a 


CALVIN 107 


hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence 
and from the idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was 
probably regarded by himself merely as one additional step 
in the long series of developments through which ecclesi- 
astical jurisprudence on the subject had already gone. In 
emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from 
the necessities of the poor and the interest which a prosper- 
ous merchant could earn with borrowed capital, he had been 
anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a moderate rate on 
loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already 
assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. 
The picture of Calvin, the organizer and disciplinarian, as 
the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a legend. Like the 
author of another revolution in economic theory, he might 
have turned on his popularizers with the protest: “I am not 
a Calvinist.” 

Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as 
they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its de- 
fenders were correct in regarding Calvin’s treatment of 
capital as a watershed. What he did was to change the 
plane on which the discussion was conducted, by treating 
the ethics of money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by 
an appeal to a special body of doctrine on the subject of 
usury, but as a particular case of the general problem 
of the social relations of a Christian community, which 
must be solved in the light of existing circumstances. 
The significant feature in his discussion of the sub- 
ject is that he assumes credit to_b l_ and in- 
wiBIC nGUERE TITHE Wile of society. He therefore dis- 
misses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testament and 
the Fathers as irrelevant, because designed for conditions 
which no longer exist, argues that the payment of interes 
for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent for land, 
and throws on the conscience of the individual the Sbligationt 
of seeing that it does not exceed the amount dictated by 


108 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in short, a 
fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the rule 
“non fanerabis,” but “léquité et la droiture,’ and appeals 
from Christian tradition to commercial common sense, 
which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian. On 
such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians. 
But capital and credit are indispensable; the financier is not 
a pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at 
interest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans 
are made freely to the poor, is not per se more extortionate 
than any other of the economic transactions without which 
human affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the 
realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of 
momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its 
off-shoots took their stand on the side of the activities which 
were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted 
that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring con- 
centration on the task of using for the glory of God the 
opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life 
could and must be lived. 

It was on this practical basis of urban industry and com- 
mercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social 
ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it 
would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be 
pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in 
which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic 
from the theological premises. ‘God not only foresaw,” 
Calvin wrote, “the fall of the first man, . .. but also ar- 
ranged all by the determination of his own will.” ** Certain 
individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation 
from eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective 
of human merit” ; the remainder have been consigned to eter- 
nal damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, but incom- 
prehensible, judgment.” ** Deliverance, in short, is the 
work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing to it, 


CALVIN | 109 


but of an objective Power. Human effort, social institu- 
tions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salva- 
tion, and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the 
true aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon 
broken reeds. 

That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of 
God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the 
sanctification of the world by strife and labor. For Calvin- 
ism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely 
practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, 
but they are indispensable as a proof. that salvation has been 
attained. The central paradox of religious ethics—that only 
those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world 
upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher 
sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they 
are the humble instruments—finds in it a special exempli- 
fication. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show 
forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is 
to live for that end. His task is at once to discipline his 
individual life, and to create a sanctified society. The 
Church, the State, the community in which he lives, must 
not merely be a means of personal salvation, or minister to 
his temporal needs, It must be a “Kingdom of Christ,” in 
which individual duties are performed by men conscious 
that they are “ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye,” and 
the whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent 
and all-embracing discipline. re F 

The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every 
age from the realization of the contrast between the ex- 
ternal order of society and the moral standards recognized 
as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And 
naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as 
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast 
is most acutely felt. The men who made the Reformation 
had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which, 


110 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows 
in the pictures of Nurnberg and Frankfurt drawn by 
_ AEneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Durer. And already a 
new dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its prom- 
ise was splendid, but it had been accompanied by a cynical 
materialism which seemed a denial of all that had been 
meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more 
‘ horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian 
Church that it reached its height. Shocked by the gulf 
between theory and practice, men turned this way and that 
to find some solution of the tension which racked them. 
The German reformers followed one road and preached a 
return to primitive simplicity. But who could obliterate 
the achievements of two centuries, or blot out the new 
worlds which science had revealed? The Humanists took 
another, which should lead to the gradual regeneration of 
mankind by the victory of reason over superstition and bru- 
tality and avarice. But who could wait for so distant a 
consummation? Might there not be a third? Was it not 
possible that, purified and disciplined, the very qualities 
which economic success demanded—thrift, diligence, so- 
briety, frugality—were themselves, after all, the foundation, 
at least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not conceivable 
that the gulf which yawned between a luxurious world and 
the life of the spirit could be bridged, not by eschewing 
material interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by dedi- 
cating them to the service of God? 

It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical 
values which the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was 
that new type of Christian character that they labored to 
create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but 
as elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on 
the aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs, 
stamped on them a new sanctification, and used them as the 
warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline 


CALVIN III 


should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that — 
fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it 
was held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged 
luxury and ostentation; the members of the Reformed 
Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned 
the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true 
Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the vir- 
tues of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to 
believe that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the 
savorless formality of individual good works reduced to a 
commercial system, as though man could keep a profit and 
loss account with his Creator: the true Christian must or- 
ganize his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It 
had rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of 
religion, even while it took bribes from those who pursued 
gain with success: the Christian must conduct his business 
with a high seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion. 

Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, 
was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and 
to weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie, 
conscious of the contrast between its own standards and 
_ those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard- 
bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate 
an open road for its own way of life by the use of every 
weapon, including political revolution and war, because the 
issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or 
self-interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, 
not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical 
government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new 
ideal of social conduct. Its practical message, it might per- 
haps be said, was la carriére ouverte—not aux talents, but 
au caracteére. ) 

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the mid- 
dle classes persuaded themselves that they were the con- 
vinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle 


112 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


of order. While their victories were still to win, they were 
everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly 
fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less 
formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the 
sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the 
nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied 
jthe same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the 
universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged 
in a different age by the theory of historical materialism. 
He set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with 
the vices of the established order at its worst, taught them 
to feel that they were a chosen people, made them conscious 
of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute 
to realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; 
it not merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Com- 
pared with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility of most 
European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bank- 
rupt monarchies, the middle classes, in whom Calvinism took 
root most deeply, were a race of iron. It was not surpris- 
ing that they made several revolutions, and imprinted their 

onceptions of political and social expediency on the public 
ife of half a dozen different States in the Old World and 
in the New. 

The two main elements in this teaching were the insist- 
ence on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and 
the call to fashion for the Christian character an objective 
embodiment in social institutions. Though logically con- 
nected, they were often in practical discord. The influence 
of Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far 
beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be called 
Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist 

\ discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between 
Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent 
men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was 
fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from 


CALVIN 113 


the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as 
one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially f 
to be fulfilled.” °’ Both an intense individualism and a 
rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s 
doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on differ- 
ences of political environment and of social class. It de- 
pended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, 
as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp 
their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, 
living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a 
hostile Government. 

In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the 
English upper classes in the seventeenth century, individua!- 
ism in social affairs was, on the whole, the prevalent phi- 
Tosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who drew 
inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending 
on England’s green and pleasant land, and the troopers of 
Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the theology of 
Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception of society, 
diluted by the practical necessities of a commercial age, and 
softened to suit the conventions of a territorial aristocracy, 
was poles apart from that of the master who founded a 
discipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud him- 
self dryly observed,°® was a thing of shreds and patches. As 
both the teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice of some 
Calvinist communities, suggest, the social ethics of the 
heroic age of Calvinism savored more of a collectivist dic- 
tatorship than of individualism. The expression of a revolt 
against the medieval ecclesiastical system, it stood itself, 
where circumstances favored it, for a discipline far more 
stringent and comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. 
If, as some historians have argued, the philosophy o 
laissez faire emerged as a result of the spread of Calvinism\ © 
among the middle classes, it did so, like tolerance, by a route 
which was indirect. It was accepted, less because it was 


114 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


esteemed for its own sake, than as a compromise forced 
Ligon Calvinism at a comparatively late stage in its history, 
as a result of its modification by the pressure of commercial 
interests, or of a balance of power between conflicting au- 
thorities. ’ 
The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of 
the burning question of Pauperism. The reform of tradi- 
tional methods of poor relief was in the air—Vives had 
written his celebrated book in 1526 °’—and, prompted both 
py Humanists and by men of religion, the secular authori- 
ties all over Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to 
cope with what was, at best, a menace to social order, and, 
at worst, a moral scandal. The question was naturally one 
which appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reforma- 
tion. The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were 
much concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, 
like the statesman, as a problem of police, nor, like the more 
intelligent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, 
but as a question of character. Calvin quoted with approval 
the words of St. Paul, “If a man will not work, neither shall 
he eat,’ condemned indiscriminate alms-giving as vehe- 
mently as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical 
authorities should regularly visit every family to ascertain 
whether its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise un- 
desirable.°* C&colampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of 
the poor.*® Bullinger lamented the army of beggars pro- 
duced by monastic charity, and secured part of the emolu- 
ments of a dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school 
and the assistance of the destitute.°° In the plan for the re- 
organization of poor relief at Zurich, which was drafted by 
Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; 
travellers were to be relieved on condition that they left the 
town next day; provision was to be made for the sick and 
aged in special institutions ; no inhabitant was to be entitled 
to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who 


CALVIN ; 115 


failed to attend church, or who played cards or was other- 
wise disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme was the 
duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive 
to work. “With labor,’ he wrote, “will no man now sup- 
port himself. . . . And yet labor is a thing so good and 
godlike . . . that makes the body hale and strong and 
cures the sicknesses produced by idleness. ... In the 
things of this life, the laborer is most like to God.” * 

In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives 
were not distinguished. ‘The idleness of the mendicant was 
both a sin against God and a social evil; the enterprise of 
the thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and 
a benefit to the community. The same combination of re- 
ligious zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks 
on gambling, swearing, excess in apparel and self-indul- 
gence in eating and drinking. The essence of the system 
was not preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific 
of both, but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the 
daily life of a visible society, which should be at once a 
Church and a State. Having overthrown monasticism, its 
aim was to turn the secular world into a giganti¢ monastery, 
and at Geneva, for a short time, it almost succeeded. “In 
other places,’ wrote Knox of that devoted city, “I confess 
Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sin- 
cerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.” ° 
Manners and morals were regulated, because it is through 
the minutie of conduct that the enemy of mankind finds his 
way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be re- 
vealed by pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793 those 
guilty of another kind of incivisme were betrayed by their 
knee-breeches. Regulation meant legislation, and, still 
more, administration. The word in which both were sum- 
marized was Discipline. 

Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves cf re- 


ligion,** and the common observation that he assigned to it. 


116 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As 
organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed pri- 
marily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censor- 
ship of morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from 
the canon law of the Church of Rome, as the rules of a pri- 
vate society may differ from the code of a State. Its es- 
tablishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the 
last half of the sixteenth century, was the result of nearly 
twenty years of struggle between the Council of the city 
and the Consistory, composed of ministers and laymen. It 
was only in 1555 that the latter finally vindicated its right 
to excommunicate, and only in the edition of the Institutes 
which appeared in 1559 that a scheme of church organiza- 
Lied and discipline was set out. But, while the answer to the 
question of the constitution of the authority by whom dis- 
cipline was to be exercised depended on political conditions, 
and thus differed in different places and periods, the neces- 
sity of enforcing a rule of life, which was the practical as- 
pect of discipline, was from the start of the very essence of 
Calvinism, Its importance was the theme of a characteristic 
letter addressed by Calvin to Somerset in October 1548, the 
moment of social convulsion for which Bucer wrote his 
book, De Regno Christi. The Protector is reminded that 
it is not from lack of preaching, but from failure to enforce 
compliance with it, that the troubles of England have sprung. 
Though crimes of violence are punished, the licentious are 
spared, and the licentious have no part in the Kingdom of 
God. He is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient 
tenus en bonne et honneste discipline,” and to be careful 
“que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de l’Evangile s’approuvent 
estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.” ** 

“Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life’’—the 
words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers, 
and their projects of social reconstruction are a commen- 
tary on the sense in which “holiness of life’ was understood. 


CALVIN 117 


It was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in form- 
ing at Zurich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of 
the clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the 
importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian 
morals ; and drew up a list of sins to be punished by excom- 
munication, which included, in addition to murder and 
theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it dis- 
covers itself in usury and fraud.” © It was in that spirit 
that Calvin composed in the Institutes a Protestant Summa 
and manual of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action 
should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule. 
It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a compre- 
hensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whois 
range of civic administration, from the regulations to be 
made for markets, crafts, buildings and fairs to the control 
of prices, interest and rents.°° It was in that spirit that he 
made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived 
its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that 
for a generation Consistory and Council worked hand in 
hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and 
contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute 
with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death. 
“Having considered,” ran the preamble to the ordinances 
of 1576, which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, 
“that it is a thing worthy of commendation above all others, 
that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus 
Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian 
Church duly maintained by good government and policy, 


and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully in-. 


structed, and the Hospital well ordered for the support of 
the poor: Which things can only be if there be established 
a certain rule and order of living, by which each man may 
be able to understand the duties of his position. . . .” °" 
The object of it all was so simple. ‘Each man to under- 
stand the duties of his position’ —what could be more de- 


\ 


118 THE: CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


sirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? It is sad to reflect that the 
attainment of so laudable an end involved the systematic 
use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its par- 
ents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in 
sixty years.°° Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 
Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Gov- 
ernments which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness. 
The characteristic which was distinctive of Geneva—‘the 
most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since 
the days of the Apostles” **—was not its merciless intol- 
erance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was possible. 
It was the attempt to make the law of God prevail even in 
ee matters of pecuniary gain and loss which mankind, to 
judge by its history, is disposed to regard more seriously 
than wounds and deaths. “No member [of the Christian 
body], wrote Calvin in his Institutes, “holds his gifts to 
himself, or for his private use, but shares them among 
his fellow members, nor does he derive benefit save from 
those things which proceed from the common profit of the 
body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his brethren 
all that it is in his power to give.” *° It was natural that 
so remorseless an attempt to claim the totality of human in- 
terests for religion should not hesitate to engage even the 
economic appetites, before which the Churches of a later 
generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism wel- 
comed the world of business to its fold with an eagerness 
unknown before, it did so in the spirit of a conqueror 
< Jprsanizing a new province, not of a suppliant arranging a 
compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals 
and a code of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testa- 
ment. Samuel and Agag, King of the Amalekites, Jonah 
and Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of 
Baal, Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of 
the Lord, and Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel 
to sin, worked on the tense imagination of the Calvinist as 


CALVIN 119 


did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793. The first 
half-century of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a pro- 
longed effort to organize an economic order worthy of the 
Kingdom of Christ, in which the ministers played the part 
of Old Testament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned 
from the fleshpots of Egypt. 

Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism 
made few innovations in the details of social policy, and 
the contents of the program were thoroughly medieval. 
The novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown 
into its application. The organ of administration before 
which offenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed 
body of laymen and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, 
punishes usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands 
or fines the merchant who defrauds his clients, the cloth- 
maker whose stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who 
provides short measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat 
above the rates fixed by authority, the tailor who charges 
strangers excessive prices, the surgeon who demands an 
excessive fee for an operation.” In the Consistory the min- 
isters appear to have carried all before them, and they are 
constantly pressing for greater stringency. rom the elec- 
tion of Beza in place of Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, 
hardly a year passes without a new demand for legislation 
from the clergy, a new censure on economic unrighteous- 
ness, a new protest against one form or another of the 
ancient sin of avarice. At one moment, it is excessive in- 
dulgence to debtors which rouses their indignation; at an- 
other, the advance of prices and rents caused by the influx 
of distressed brethren from the persecutions in France; at a 
third, the multiplication of taverns and the excessive charges 
demanded by the sellers of wine. Throughout there is a 
prolonged warfare against the twin evils of extortionate in- 
terest and extortionate prices. 

Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely 


120 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


for the same reasons which made it a burning question 
everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth century, 
but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French 
wars of religion, the city was a financial center of some 1m- 
portance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In 
order to secure command of the necessary funds, it had 
borrowed heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council 
used the capital to do exchange business and make ad- 
vances, the rate of interest being fixed at 10, and later at 
12, per cent. To the establishment of a bank the ministers, 
who had been consulted, agreed ; against the profitable busi- 
ness of advancing money at high rates of interest to private 
persons they protested, especially when the loans were made 
to spendthrifts who used them to ruin themselves. When, 
ten years later, in 1580, the Council approved the project 
advanced by some company promoters of establishing a 
second bank in the city, the ministers led the opposition to it, 
pointed to the danger of covetousness as revealed by the 
moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice 
and Lyons, and succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. 
Naturally, however, the commoner issue was a more simple 
one. The capitalist who borrowed in order to invest and 
make a profit could take care of himself, and the ministers 
explained that they had no objection to those “qui baillent 
leur argent aux marchands pour emploier en marchandise.” 
The crucial issue was that of the money-lender who makes 
advances “‘simplement a un qui aura besoin,’ and who 
thereby exploits the necessities of his poorer neighbors.” 
Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without 
ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name 
of the New Testament, in language drawn principally from 
the less temperate portions of the Old, as larrons, brigands, 
loups et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and 
stoned to death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their 
gains: but what they are heaping up for themselves is the 


CALVIN I2I 


wrath of God. . . . One has cried in the market-place, ‘a 
curse on those who bring us dearth.’ . . . The Lord has 
heard that cry ... and yet we are asking the cause of 
the pestilence! . . . A cut-purse shall be punished, but the 
Lord declares by his prophet Amos... ‘Famine is come 
upon my people of Israel, O ye who devour the poor.’ The 
threats there uttered have been executed against his peo- 
ple.” “* They demand that for his second offense the usurer 
shall be excommunicated, or that, if such a punishment be 
thought too severe, he shall at least be required to testify 
his repentance publicly in church, before being admitted to 
the sacrament. They remind their fellow-citizens of the 
fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momentarily despairing of 
controlling the money-lender directly, they propose to de- 
prive him of his victims by removing the causes which cre- 
ate them. Pour tarir les ruisseaux il faut escouper la 
source. Men borrow because of “idleness, foolish extrava- 
gance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be estab- 
lished at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among 
rich as well as among poor, how each household earns its 
livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve are 
taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litiga- 
tion, and to “‘bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are 
such wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the 
necessities of their poor neighbors.” ™* 

The Venerable Company advanced their program, but 
they were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and 
they concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers the pious 
hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of your hon- 
orable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” 
Their apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva 
endured many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on 
the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were 
limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business 
ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not ven 


122 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


ture to question the right of the clergy to be heard on mat- 
ters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and 
platform in one; ministers had the public behind them, and, 
conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel 
submission by threatening to resign en masse. Profuse in 
expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon 
balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yield- 
ing down of official procrastination, and its first reply was 
normally gu’on y pense un peu. To the clergy its inactivity 
was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did 
not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 
1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he accused members 
of the Council of having intelligence with speculators who 
had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the minis- 
ters were reproaching the Council with laxity in administra- 
tion, and they finally denounced it as the real author of the 
rise in the prices of bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed 
to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral 
discipline and social reform. 

The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no 
objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to ex- 
horting the public to attend sermons and to send their chil- 
dren to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covet- 
ousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were 
obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers con- 
cerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on 
the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports 
of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do cred- 
itors, they would make no concession to the complaint that 
debtors were subjected to a ‘“‘double usury,” since they were 
compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. 
Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late 
M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been 
approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. 
Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. 


CALVIN 123 


They informed the Council that large sums were being spent 
by speculators in holding up supplies.of corn, and launched 
a campaign of sermons against avarice, with appropriate 
topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted 
by accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the 
rich,” 

The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. 
One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza’s remarks as a 
personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard 
before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty, 
condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty 
crowns which he had lent at Io per cent. interest. Evidently, 
when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, 
however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The 
Council and the ministers had already had words over the 
sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a 
year or two later over the administration of the local hospi- 
tal. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy 
were interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied 
politely that they would be well advised to mind their own 
business. 

So monstrous a suggestion—as though there were any 
human activity which was not the business of the Church !— 
evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in 
which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set 
forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for 
having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at 
extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one 
of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps 
his corn in time of scarcity’? To the charge of intemperate 
language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin 
by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no 
more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should 
be silent,’ said Beza, “what would the people say? That 
they are dumb dogs. . . . As to the question of causing 


124 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing 
talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four 
usurers have been punished. ... It is notorious every- 
where that the city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary 
rate is IO per cent. or more.” ‘© The magistrates renewed 
their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an 
adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had mercifully com- 
muted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed 
by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.” But at the godly 
proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their 
humanity blenched. Besides, the punishment was not only 
cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, ‘most men are debtors.” 
If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their 
fury will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, 
the magistrates did not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave 
scripture for scripture. They informed the ministers that 
they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when 
rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the min- 
isters replied in the language of Nathan, we are not in- 
formed. , 
Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of 
the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the col- 
lectivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the 
x omnicompetent Church.’* The religious community formed 
a closely organized society, which, while using the secular 
authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not 
only instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was 
itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the 
standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting 
down offences against public order and public morals, pro- 
viding for the education of youth and for the relief of the 
poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and 
secular authorities, which for a short time made the system 
possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when 
Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a mi- 


qe 


CALVIN 125 


nority in a national State organized on principles quite dif- 
ferent from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, 


rebellion, civil war or the abandonment of the pretension | 


to control society was the inevitable consequence. But the 
last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, what- 
ever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist 
Churches is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility 
for the moral conduct of their members in all the various 
relations of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of 
economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious 
temptations to a lapse into immorality. 

The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Re- 
formed Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in 
1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted, 
certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were dis- 
cussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention 
at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as 
the historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to 
lax the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the 
time.” *° Once it is admitted that membership of the Church 
involves compliance with a standard of economic morality 
which the Church must enforce, the problems of interpre- 
tation which arise are innumerable, and the religious com- 
munity finds itself committed to developing something like 
a system of case law, by the application of its general prin- 
ciples to a succession of varying situations. The elaboration 
of such a system was undertaken; but it was limited in the 
sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the 
economic structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except 
at Geneva, being concerned not to reform society, but merely 
to repress the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with 
matters on which specific guidance was demanded by the 
Churches. 

Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a 
few. What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards 


fe 


-~ 


126 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May 
pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord’s 
Supper? May the brethren trade with such persons, or do 
they share their sin if they buy their goods? The law of 
the State allows moderate interest : what is to be the attitude 
of the Church? What is to be done to prevent craftsmen 
cheating the consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen 
oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are lotteries per- 
missible? Is it legitimate to invest at interest monies be- 
queathed for the benefit of the poor? The answers which 
the French Synods made to such questions show the per- 
sistence of the idea that the transactions of business are the 
province of the Church, combined with a natural desire to 
avoid an impracticable rigor. All persons who have wrung 
wealth unjustly from others must make restitution before 
they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be 
bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and 
approved by the civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent 
wares are to be censured, and tradesmen are to seek only 
“indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the same 
division of opinion is visible in the French Reformed 
Church as existed at the same time in England and Hol- 
land, and Calvin’s advice on the subject was requested. The 
stricter school would not hear of confining the prohibition 
of usury to “excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of 
raising money for the poor by interest on capital. In 
France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these heroic 
rigors had passed, and the common-sense view prevailed. 
The brethren were required to demand no more than the 
law allowed and than was consistent with charity. Within 
these limits interest was not to be condemned.*° 

Of the treatment of questions of this order by English 
Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In 
Scotland the-views of the reformers as to economic ethics 
did not differ in substance from those of the Church before 


CALVIN 127 


the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline de- 
nounced covetousness with the same- vehemence as did the 
“accursed Popery’” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen 
are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches 
are required to make provision for the poor. ‘Oppression 
of the poor by exactions,” it is declared, “[and] deceiving 
of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure 
. . . do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish 
the same as God’s word commandeth.” ** The interpreta- 
tion given to these offences is shown by the punishment of a 
usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions 
of St. Andrews.* The relief of the poor was in 1579 
made the statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scot- 
land, seven years after it had in England been finally trans- 
ferred to the State. The arrangement under which in 
rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of 
ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age 
in which the real State in Scotland had been represented, 
not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox. 
Of English-speaking communities, that in which the so- 
cial discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to 
the furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of ~ 
England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rul 
of Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies ~ 
of contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bish- ~ 
opless Eden, where men desired only to worship God “ac- 
cording to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the 
laws of God’s word,” * not only were “tobacco and immod- 
est fashions and costly apparel,” and “that vain custom of 
drinking one to another,’ forbidden to true professors, but 
the Fathers adopted towards that “notorious evil... 
whereby most men walked in all their commerce—to buy as 
cheap and sell as dear as they can,” ** an attitude which pos- 
sibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business- 
like descendants. At an early date in the history of Mas- 


128 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


sachusetts a minister had called attention to the recru- 
descence of the old Adam—“profit being the chief aim and 
not the propagation of religion’”—and Governor Bradford, 
observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward es- 
tates,” remarked that the increase in material prosperity 
“will be the ruin of New England, at least of the Churches 
of God there.’ ** Sometimes Providence smote the ex- 
ploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American 
Trust—he owned the only milch cow on board and sold 
the milk at 2d. a quart—“being after at a sermon wherein 
oppression was complained of . . . fell distracted.” °° Those 
who escaped the judgment of Heaven had to face the civil 
authorities and the Church, which, in the infancy of the 
colony, were the same thing. 

Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate 
of interest, fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incor- 
rigible idlers; for these things had been done even in the 
house of bondage from which they fled. What was more 
distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to 
apply the same wholesome discipline to the elusive category 
of business profits. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts 
authorities decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs 
of the buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable 
return to the seller.*7 Against those who charged more, 
their wrath was that of Moses descending to find the chosen 
people worshipping a golden calf. What little emotion they 
had to spare from their rage against religious freedom, they 
turned against economic license. Roger Williams touched 
a real affinity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he 
argued that, though extortion was an evil, it was an evil 
the treatment of which should be left to the discretion of 
the civil authorities.** 

Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by 
general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in 


CALVIN 129 


which he took “in some .... above 6d. in the shilling 
profit; in some above &d.; and in some small things above 
two for one”; and this, though he was “an ancient pro- 
fessor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and 
having but one child, having come over for conscience’ sake 
and for the advancement of the gospel.”’ The scandal was 
terrible. Profiteers were unpopular—‘‘the cry of the coun- 
try was great against oppression’—and the grave elders re- 
flected that a reputation for greed would injure the infant 
community, lying as it did “under the curious observation of 
all Churches and civil States in the world.” In spite of all, 
the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There was no 
positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to 
determine what profits were fair; the sin of charging what 
the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, 
after all, the law of God required no more than double res- 
titution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him 
only £200. 

Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the 
matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he 
damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned 
before the church of Boston, he first of all “did with tears 
acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” 
and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in 
which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how 
could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one 
article by additional profit on another? Here was a text 
on which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. 
The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and 
took occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day 
to lay open the error af such false principles, and to give 
some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles 
were these :— 


130 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


“1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as 
cheap as he can. 

“2, If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his 
commodities, he may raise the price of the rest. 

“2, That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too 
dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc. 

“4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own 
skill or ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or neces- 
sity. 

‘“‘s. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like 
recompence of one as of another.” 


The rules for trading were not less explicit :-— 


“1, A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such 
a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who 
knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he 
had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which 
every man will take, etc. 

“2, When a man loseth in his commodity for want of 
skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and 
therefore must not lay it upon another. 

“3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a 
loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease 
himself of it by casting it upon another ; for so a man should 
seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should 
never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, 
there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of 
God upon the commodity, and not the person. 

“4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity 
than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is 
worth thus much.” 


It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not re- 
membered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of 
Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appro- 
priate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, 
-however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel 
with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent. 

The sermon was followed by an animated debate within 


CALVIN 131 


the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 
11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he 
might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person 
within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as 
that he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetous- 
ness. The question was only whether he had erred through 
ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his 
conscience or the very light of nature’—whether, in short, 
his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped 
with his fine and admonition.” 

If the only Christian documents which survived were the 
New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches 
in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection be- 
tween them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology 
would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. 
Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, 
the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin’s sys- 
tem was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than 
either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than 
the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the 
ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its 
zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not 
merely actions and writings, but thoughts. 

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity 
would have been regarded by its champions as a compli- 
ment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Cal- 
vinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with en- 
thusiasm, For the Calvinist Church was an army march- 
ing back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all 
from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of 
the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the 
encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient 
is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry ap- 
peared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the 
Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the 


132 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 


dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. 
If it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was ac- 
cepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the 
orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endi- 
cott shocked at last even the savage superstition of New Eng- 
land, that result was only to be expected. 

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice 
of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyran- 
nies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. 
Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted 
wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or 
relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its 
youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable 
Wee the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it 
hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of 
Moses and Aaron.”° | 


CHAR EE RSI 


THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


“Tf any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the 
common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace 
and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must 
live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the 


eyucch,: 
Laup, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621. 


eae 
.f & ire 
a 


i 





CHAPTER Tit 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend 
from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all 
issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which 
were motived by changes in the texture of society and the 
relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their 
result without significance for the future. In England, as 
on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp 
collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle 
Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doc- 
trines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their grad- 
ual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of 
economic organization and of the province of religion, and 
their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious 
antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the 
lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm 
blew and they flickered out. 

Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic 
civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce 
and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany. 
With the commercial revolution which followed the Dis- 
coveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of cu- 
riosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate 
return of treasure died down. It was not till more than 
half a century later, when the silver of the New World 
was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it 
might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of 
at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the 
East began in earnest. 

135 


136 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English 
economic life was in process of swift transformation. For- 
eign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth 
century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced 
wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce 
went the growth of the financial organization on which 
commerce depends, and English capital poured into the 
growing London money-market, which had previously been 
dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion 
of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, oppor- 
tunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of 
middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising 
interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent on se- 
curing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and 
produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the 
defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate dis- 
cipline, their organized torpor restricting individual enter- 
prise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly 
evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate 
towns, within which alone the pressure of economic con- 
formity could be made effective, or he accepted the gild or- 
ganization, captured its government, and by means of it 
developed a system under which the craftsman, even if 
nominally a master, was in effect the servant of an em- 
ployer. In agriculture, the customary organization of the 
village was being sapped from below and battered down 
from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had com- 
muted the labor services that were still the rule in France and 
Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or 
agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute 
business men, were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farm- 
ers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing, 
and eager to clear away the network of communal restric- 
tions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, indus- 
try and agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual 


THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 137 


for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, 
injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a 
stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all 
customary relationships. 

It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambi- 
tions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and 
failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbu- 
lent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer 
to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his 
estates as a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, 
once content to win a position of dignity and power in fra- 
ternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving 
his way to solitary preeminence, unaided by the artificial 
protection of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of 
peasant and craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat 
of famine, their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, 
was added the haunting insecurity of a growing, though 
still small, proletariat, detached from their narrow niche 
in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they 
could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control. 


I. THE LAND QUESTION 


The England of the Reformation, to which posterity 
turns as a source of high debates on church government and 
doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with 
economic unrest and social passions. But the material on 
which agitation fed had been accumulating for three gen- 
erations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle 
of the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the 
currency, there was not one—neither enclosures and pasture 
farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the 
rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, 
nor the extortions of the engrosser—which had not evoked 
popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced 


138 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


legislation and administrative action, long before the Ref- 
ormation Parliament met. The floods were already run- 
ning high, when the religious revolution swelled them with 
a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the so- 
cial situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping 
redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous 
minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and 
fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovern- 
ment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated 
every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which 
was squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a 
torrent of writing on questions not only of religion, but of 
social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the 
changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head in 
a sweeping indictment of the new economic forces and an 
eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social ob- 
ligations. The center of both was the land question. For 
it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupid- 
ity of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most 
important ground of social agitation. 

The land question had been a serious matter for the 
greater part of a century before the Reformation. The first 
detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry 
priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.7 Then had come 
the legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal 
Commission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.’ 
Throughout, a steady stream of criticism had flowed from 
men of the Renaissance, like More, Starkey and a host 
of less well-known writers, dismayed at the advance of 
social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles to be performed 
by a Prince who would take counsel of philosophers. 

If, however, the problem was acute long before the con- 
fiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury 
of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open to 
serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last 


THE LAND QUESTION 139 


days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The 
monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents 
whom they often employed to manage their property nat- 
urally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world 
around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more fre- 
quent o- more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical 
land-owners.* In England a glance at the proceedings of 
the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to 
show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copy-holders 
into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted 
arable land to pasture.* 

In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part 
of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the 
part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to ex- 
plain the part which the rapid transference of great masses 
of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst 
side of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is 
that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the 
market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Es- 
tates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of 
£15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed hands.® To the abbey 
lands which came into the market after 1536 were added 
those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial 
necessities of the Crown were too pressing to allow of its 
retaining them in its own possession and drawing the rents ; 
nor, in any case, would that have been the course dictated 
by prudence to a Government which required a party to 
carry through a revolution. What it did, therefore, was to 
alienate most of the land almost immediately, and to spend 
the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of 
land speculation. Much of the property was bought by 
needy courtiers, at a ridiculously low figure. Much of it 
passed to sharp business men, who brought to bear on its 
management the methods learned in the financial school of 
the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gres- 


Wemeey 


140 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


ham. Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scat- 
tered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and disposed 
of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, 
groups of tradesmen—cloth-workers, leather-sellers, mer- 
chant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual 
syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, 
and the conversions of arable to pasture were the natural 
result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, 
unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transac- 
tion would not pay.° 

Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than 
the Crown? “Do ye not know,” said the grantee of one 
of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer 
to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their com- 
mons, “that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses 
of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time 
come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such 
poor knaves as ye be.” * Such arguments, if inconsequent, 
were too convenient not to be common. The protests of con- 
temporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter 
struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and 
some of the new landlords—the Herberts, who enclosed a 
whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which, ac- 
cording to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his Ar- 
cadia, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, 
third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Ab- 
bey, whose tenants found their rents raised from £29 to £64 
a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging the Gov- 
ernment with petitions for redress.* The legend, still re- 
peated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of 
monastic estates died out in three generations, though un- 
veracious, is not surprising. The wish was father to the 
thought. 

It was an age in which the popular hatred of the en- 
closer and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sen- 


THE LAND QUESTION 141 


timent, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught 
that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea 
of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but 
aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, 
doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social con- 
servatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders 
came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from 
divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw 
in economic individualism but another expression of the 
laxity and license which had degraded the purity of re- 
ligion, and who understood by reformation a return to the 
moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its 
government and doctrine. The touching words ® in which 
the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social ef- 
fects of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were 
mild compared with the denunciations launched ten years 
later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet. 

Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green 
tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into 
social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of dis- 
appointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The 
movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, 
not with two, but with several, faces, and among them 
had been one which looked wistfully for a political and 
social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of re- 
ligion.*® In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men 
had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the 
State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, 
not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of 
learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, 
by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, 
a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the 
faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encour- 
agement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, 


142 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ? 


was the vision which had floated before the eyes of the 
humanitarian and the idealist. 

It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height 
of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and 
Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social pro- 
gram of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Chris- 
tian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his 
pupil how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a 
Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its de- 
tails elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a 
disciple of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated 
by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, 
a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to 
introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put 
under the plow. It is to take a high line with the commer- 
cial classes. For, though trade in itself is honorable, most 
traders are rogues—indeed “next to the sham priests, no 
class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth” ; 
their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Gov- 
ernments to overlook both. Fortunately, the remedies are 
simple. The State must fix just prices—‘‘a very necessary 
but an easy matter.”’ Only “pious persons, devoted to the 
Commonwealth more than to their own interests,’ are to 
be allowed to engage in trade at all. In every village and 
town a school is to be established under a master eminent 
for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all 
things strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to 
the glory of God. . . . Neither the Church of Christ, nor 
a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer 
private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their 
neighbors.” 

The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those 
that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make 
the Reformation a political success had sold their support 
on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social 


THE LAND QUESTION 143 


disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their 
teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not 
to be whipped off by asermon. The Government of Edward 
VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in 
fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial 
adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of 
piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, 
what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them 
away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments 
among courtiers. There were probably more schools in pro- 
portion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century 
than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These 
endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still 
line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the 
day.” * “King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools” are the 
schools which King Edward VI did not destroy. 

The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising 
that the reformers should ask what had become of the 
devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to 
have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? 
The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privi- 
leges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin 
in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform 
of doctrine and ritual—side by side with these good things 
had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much edu- 
cation, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate 
property which provoked protests even in the House of 
Commons, ** and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the 
floating of an immense land syndicate, with favorable terms 
for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on 
the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Ref- 
ormation when it was still a gambling stock naturally 
nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants 
as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights 
of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nou- 


144 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


veaux riches.** ‘The men whose religion was not money 
said what they thought of the business in pamphlets and 
sermons, which left respectable congregations spluttering 
with fury. 

Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that 
the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized 
the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sym- 
pathy with the peasants who rose under Ket. * Becon told 
the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the 
only difference between them and the monks was that they 
were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing 
the last penny from the tenants, more selfish in spending the 
whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.*® “In 
suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges and chantries,”’ 
preached Lever in St. Paul’s, “the intent of the King’s Maj- 
esty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very 
godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other won- 
drous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods as was 
superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or voluptuously 
upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to bear 
his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common 
wealth, or partly unto other men’s hands, for the better re- 
lief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and the setting 
forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers have so 
used this matter, that even those goods which did serve 
to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and 
to comfortable necessary hospitality in the common wealth, 
be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous am- 
bition. . . . You which have gotten these goods into your 
own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other 
goods more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you 
that have offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, 
spoiled the poor, and brought a common wealth into a 
common misery.” *7 
This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies 


THE LAND QUESTION 145 


as the “Commonwealth men” from their advocacy of social 
reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet 
and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge 
of stirring up class-hatred, which is normally brought 
against all who call attention to its causes. The result of 
their activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission 
to inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the 
conversion of arable to pasture, the introduction of legis- 
lation requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding 
of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had 
taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. 
The gentry were furious. Paget, the secretary to the 
Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror, pro- 
vided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily 
that the German Peasants’ War was to be reénacted in 
England; the Council, most of whose members held abbey 
lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the personification of the 
predatory property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely for 
carrying out, as chairman of the Midland committee of the 
Depopulation Commission, the duties laid upon him by the 
Government. “Sir,” wrote a plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, 
“be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretense of 
simplicity and poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. 
So do I fear there doth in these men called Common 
Wealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state 
of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest), 
I assure you they are in such doubt, that almost they dare 
touch none of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they 
are afraid of them, but for that some of them have been 
sent up and come away without punishment, and that 
Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of 
others.’”’ *® 

The “Common Wealth called Latimer’? was unrepentant. 
Combining gifts of humor and invective which are not 
very common among bishops, his fury at oppression did 


146 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of 
uproarious laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to 
make the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is 
damned in the next. So he was delighted when he pro- 
voked one of his audience into the exclamation, “Mary, a 
seditious fellow!” used the episode as comic relief in his 
next sermon,”® and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his 
denunciations of step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the 
doom of the covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself? 


You thoughte that I woulde not requyre 
The bloode of all suche at your hande, 
But be you sure, eternall fyre 

Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande. 

Both for the housynge and the lande 
That you have taken from the pore 
Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.?° 


On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the 
authors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and, 
thanks to Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, modern research 
has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their 
story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large 
impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the re- 
organization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what 
shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, 
but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it 
seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of 
wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands 
or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less 
of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the 
parent of both. That creed was that the individual is 
absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by 
positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary 
advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his 
own profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give 


THE LAND QUESTION 147 


account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in 
short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted 
by all civilized communities. 

The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant 
had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so 
acute a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were 
part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the 
interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that 
had been changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, 
by the expansion of the woollen industry and the devalua- 
tion of money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced la- 
. bor, if it had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of 
landowning had been revolutionized, and for two genera- 
tions the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial 
right to fine or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had 
been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up admission 
fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turn- 
ing copyholds into leases. The official opposition to de- 
population, which had begun in 1489 and was to last al- 
most till 1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interfer- 
ence with the rights of property. In their attacks on the 
restraints imposed by village custom from below and by 
the Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the 
statutes forbidding depopulation, and in their fierce resist- 
ance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore the 
old order, the interests which were making the agrarian 
revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic 
conception of ownership which was to carry all before it 
after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it denied 
both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was 
not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eight- 
eenth century to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to 
silence the preaching of all social duties save that of sub- 
mission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on 
its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a 


148 THE CHURCH Of ENGLAND 


flattering, but innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the ob- 
ligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues un- 
challenged and indefeasible. 

A religious theory. of society necessarily regards with 
suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the un- 
fettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the 
end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former 
the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations 
imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imper- 
fect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high 
value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service 
of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with 
means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental 
to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, 
when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being 
sought for “the glory of the Creator and the relief of 
man’s estate.”’ Toa temper nurtured on such ideas, the new 
agrarian régime, with its sacrifice of the village—a fellow- 
ship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, 
“a little commonwealth’—to the pecuniary interests of a 
great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked 
and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. 
It was the work of ‘men that live as thoughe there were no 
God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes, 
men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would 
be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied.” 7* Its 
essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repu- 
diating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against 
this new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, 
but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Ref- 
ormation called down fire from heaven. 

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of prop- 
erty, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made 
by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds 
of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was lim- 


THE LAND QUESTION 149 


ited at cvery turn by the rights of the community and the 
obligations of charity. Its practical application was an 
idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing 
before the advance of more business-like and impersonal 
forms of land-ownership, and which, once an engine of ex- 
ploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak 
against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a 
hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the 
second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a 
mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible 
office. Its raison d’étre is not only income, but service. It 
is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such 
means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether 
labor on the land, or labor in government, which are in- 
volved in the particular status which he holds in the system. 
He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, 
or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to 
its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence 
and destroys his own moral title, for he has “every man’s 
living and does no man’s duty.” ” 

The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from 
the function which he performs and should lapse if he re- 
pudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they 
are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. 
Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way 
which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound 
by the law of the village to grow the crops which the vil- 
lage needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his 
neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by custom 
and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by 
methods of agriculture which injure his neighbors and 
weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand 
increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though dif- 
ferent, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, 
not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to re: 


150 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


buke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the 
greed for personal gain. “We heartily pray thee to send 
thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the 
grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that 
they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not 
rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor 
yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner 
of covetous worldlings . . . but so behave themselves in 
letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this 
life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.” * 
Thus, while the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of 
this transitory life to their liking, did a pious monarch con- 
sider their eternal welfare in the Book of Private Prayer 
issued in 1553. 


II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 


If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be 
as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. 
The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insur- 
gent economic interests with a generalized appeal to tra- 
ditional morality and an idealization of the past was only 
too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, 
if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in 
the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social 
theory, to which the most representative minds of the Eng- 
lish Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after 
the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commer- 
cial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed 
one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the 
struggle between the new economic movements of the age 
and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen 
was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, 
as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of 
wages, but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 151 


center of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity in which 
a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, 
epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries de- 
scribed by the word usury. 

“Treasure doth then advance greatness,’ wrote Bacon, 
in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age,” when 
the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than 
few.” ** In spite of the growing concentration of prop- 
erty, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern 
phase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which 
the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most 
industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of 
a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant 
farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of 
small property-owners, of whose independence and prosper- 
ity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed 
beggars” of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a 
minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, 
and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with 
the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at 
worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a 
strong position vis-d-vis their employers. The special eco- 
nomic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its spe- 
cial qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile in- 
dustry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, 
which evoked programs of social reform, and which 
prompted both legislation and administrative activity, 
sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning prole- 
tariat by its employers, but from the relation of the pro- 
ducer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom 
he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer 
in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer 
must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to 
finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The crafts- 
man must buy raw materials on credit and get advances 


152 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must 
scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. 
Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must 
constantly ask the seller to “give day.’’ Almost every one, 
therefore, at one time or another, has need of the money- 
lender. And the lender is often a monopolist—‘‘a money 
master,” a malster or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is 
the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and arti- 
sans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.” 

In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should 
have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by 
practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, 
in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the 
ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by 
medieval Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was 
rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, 
not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety 
to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes 
of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened, 
but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had 
been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case 
of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the mor- 
alist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval 
scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity 
in bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when 
both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury 
had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains 
of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in 
the economic conditions of the age, they were the most con- 
spicuous species, of extortion. 

In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth 
century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which 
it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a 
character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could 
be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 153 


any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be 
classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word 
by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury 
was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a 
loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating 
down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land 
by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent 
higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the 
paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy 
debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a 
loan, the excessive profits of a middleman—all these had 
been denounced as usury in the very practical thirteenth- 
century manual of St. Raymond; ’*° all these were among the 
“unlawful chaffer,” the ‘“‘sublety and sleight,’ which was 
what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to ser- 
mons in parish churches meant by usury three centuries 
later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he 
would probably have answered with a quotation from Scrip- 
ture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he 
would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the 
words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the bill 
introduced in 1571: “It standeth doubtful what usury is; 
we have no true definition of it.” *’ The truth is, indeed, 
that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more 
advantage than the other, and used his power to the full, 
was regarded as usurious. The description which best sums 
up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is con- 
tained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his pa- 
rishiohers to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the 
shilling—the cry of all poor men since the world began— 
Dr. Bennet “is a great taker of advantages.” ”* 

It was the fact that the theory of usury which the di- 
vines of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated 
freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element 
in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave 


154 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the cen- 
ter. The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was 
fanned by the conviction that the issue at stake was not 
merely a legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole 
scheme of medieval thought, which had attempted to treat 
economic affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing 
all interests and activities, of which the apex was religion. 

If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution 
which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiasti- 
cal organization and the traditional scheme of social thought. 
The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse, 
morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from 
1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession 
of changes in the appearance of the building and the form 
of the services. But there was little to make him conscious 
of any alteration in the social system of which the church 
was the center, or in the duties which that system imposed 
upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish 
continued to be a community in which religious and social! 
obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a 
parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority, 
that he bore his share of public burdens and performed such 
public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he 
saw most in the routine of his daily life were the church- 
wardens. The place where most public business was trans- 
acted, and where news of the doings of the great world 
came to him, was the parish church. The contributions 
levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. 
Such education as was available for his children was often 
given by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training 
in cooperation with his fellows as he received sprang from 
common undertakings maintained by the parish, which 
owned property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, 
advanced money, made large profits by church ales, and oc- 
casionally engaged in trade.*® Membership of the Church 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 155 


and of the State being co-extensive and equally compul- 
sory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization 
of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the 
religious, political and economic aspects of life were dis- 
entangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was 
the channel through which official information was conveyed 
to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was 
to the clergy and the parochial organization that the State 
turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 col- 
lectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in 
conjunction with the parson. 

Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the re- 
ligious thought of the age was not less conservative than its 
ecclesiastical organization. Both in their view of religion 
as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the par- 
ticular social obligations which religion involved, the most 
representative thinkers of the Church of England had no 
intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the 
rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to 
damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic 
enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in 
their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and 
of the social order were to be sought, not in practical ex- 
pediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guar- 
dian and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in 
the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had 
intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the 
Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable 
after the Restoration. 

The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his 
economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the 
subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. 
The exactions of middlemen—‘“merchants of mischief 
. . . [who] do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet 
wonderful vile and of small price to many that must needs 


vi 


156 - “CHE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


set or sell that which is their own honestly come by’— 
were pilloried by Lever.*° Nicholas Heming, whose treatise 
on The Lawful Use of Riches became something like a 
standard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price, 
and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded 
freedom of contract as an excuse for covetousness: “Cloake 
the same by what title you liste, your synne is excedyng 
greate. . . . He which hurteth but one man is in a damn- 
able case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest 
whole householdes to their graves, or at the leaste art a 
meanes of their extreame miserie? ‘Thou maiest finde 
shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou 
shalte not escape the judgemente of God.” ** Men eminent 
among Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took 
part in the controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop 
of Salisbury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an 
archbishop of Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp Arratgn- 
ment to be dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer 
in the seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bish- 
ops and ten doctors of divinity—not to mention numberless 
humbler clergy—who had written in the course of the last 
hundred years on different aspects of the sin of extortion 
in all its manifold varieties.°* The subject was still a fa- 
vorite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century 
preacher was untrammeled by the convention which in a 
more fastidious age was to preclude as an impropriety the 
discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market- 
place. “As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote 
Heming, “so it is the parte of the preachers to reprove 
usurie. . . . First, they should earnestly inveigh against 
all unlawfull and wicked contractes. ... Let them... 
amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall 
discipline . . . Then, if they cannot reforme all abuses 
which they shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that 
they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende 


. 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 157 


the cause unto God ..-. Last of all, let them with dili- 
gence admonishe the ritche men, that-they suffer not them- 
selves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches.’’ *° 
“This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the 
ecclesiastical condemnation of usury, “hath been the gen- 
erall judgment of the Church for above this fifteene hun- 
dred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie 
Church of Christ, that could never finde a lawfull usurie 
before this golden age wherein we live.” ** The first fact 
which strikes the modern student of this body of teaching 
is its continuity with the past. In its insistence that buying 
and selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are 
to be controlled by a moral law, of which the Church is 
the guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did 
not differ from religious opinion before it. The reformers 
themselves were conscious, neither of the emancipation from 
the economic follies of the age of medieval darkness ascribed 
to them in the eighteenth century, nor of the repudiation 
of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which 
some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt 
from Rome. The relation in which they conceived them- 
selves to stand to the social theory of the medieval Church 
is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed. ‘“There- 
fore I would not,” wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of 
Requests and for a short time Secretary of State, “have 
men altogether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to con- 
dempne every thinge there written, because the Popes were 
aucthours of them, as though no good lawe coulde bee made 
by them. ... Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are 
some suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, 
saye others what they list.” °° From the lips of a Tudor 
official, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain pi- 
quancy. But, in their appeal to the traditional teaching of 
the Church, Wilson’s words represented the starting point 


158 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


from which the discussions of social questions still com- 
monly set out. 

The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, 
church councils, and commentators on the canon law—all 
these, and not only the first, continued to be quoted as de- 
cisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the 
theology and government of the medieval Church were an 
abomination. What use Wilson made of them, a glance at 
his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced 
the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of 
the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reforma- 
tion authorities running into several pages.*° The author 
of a practical memorandum on the amendment of the law 
with regard to money-lending—a memorandum which ap- 
pears to have had some effect upon policy—thought it neces- 
sary to drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of 
financiers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative 
exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and 
Hostiensis.°7 Even a moralist who denied all virtue what- 
ever to “the decrees of the Pope’ did so only the more 
strongly to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable deal- 
ing contained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings 
of godlie Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.” ** Ob- 
jective economic science was developing in the hands of the 
experts who wrote on agriculture, trade, and, above all, on 
currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they 
read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intru- 
sion of Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and 
by their obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intel- 
lectual nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric 
as the voice of a musty superstition. For one who exam- 
ined present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted 
quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon 
was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The as- 
sumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 159 


as to social ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after 
the Reformation as it had been before it. 

Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins 
which no one commits or with sins that every one commits, 
and the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as 
pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not however, 
stand alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Ref- 
ormation in the political and social position of the Church 
it is not necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm 
of the State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, 
was fast losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy 
three-quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous trans- 
ference of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward pre- 
sented by lay patrons, were not likely to display any ex- 
cessive independence. But the canon law was nationalized, 
not abolished; the assumption of most churchmen through- 
out the sixteenth century was that it was to be administered ; 
and the canon law included the whole body of legislation 
as to equity in contracts which had been inherited from the 
Middle Ages. True, it was administered no longer by the 
clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting 
under the authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibi- 
tion of the study of canon law—after the estimable Dr. Lay- 
ton had “set Dunce in Bocardo” at Oxford—it languished 
at the universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 
to 1552, and again, and on this occasion for good, after 
1571, parliamentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans 
at interest, provided that it did not exceed a statutory maxi- 
mum. But the convulsion which changed the source of 
canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, 
alter its scope. Its validity was not the less: because it was 
now enforced in the name, not of the Pope, but of the King. 

As Maitland has pointed out,*® there was a moment to- 
wards the middle of the century when the civil law was 
pressing the common law hard. The civil law, as Sir 


160 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a 
promising career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical 
courts.*° Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had 
much to say about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under 
Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate treatise on the sub- 
ject was compiled.** By an argument made familiar by a 
modern controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion 
have diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does 
not excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not 
only of the State, but of the Church. “The permission of 
the Prince,” it was urged, “is no absolution from the author- 
ity of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull.. . 
yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In 
this case the Canons are to be preferred. . . . By the laws 
no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must 
pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to 
them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their 
SOULS: (asc 

It was this theory which was held by almost all the ec- 
clesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the 
sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a | 
pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of England... 
usury is simply and generally prohibited.” ** When the 
lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 
for a restoration of their privileges, they urged, among 
other matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon 
lawes as in tymes past has been used.” ** In the abortive 
scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
tion drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in 
the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were 
to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often 
have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, ex- 
plaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits 
derived from objects which yielded increase by the natural 
process of growth.*® Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 161 


the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly empha- 
sized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend 
and demand back more than the principal, whatever the 
guise under which the transaction may be concealed.*® 
Bishops’ articles of visitation down to the Civil War re- 
quired the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, 
together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.*’ 
The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impeni- 
tent promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of 
Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all 
included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to 
ecclesiastical discipline.** 

The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with 
the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last 
half of the century to play an important, if increasingly un- 
popular, part in the machinery of local government. In 
addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of 
charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the 
poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for being an un- 
charitable person and for not giving to the poor and im- 
potent,” *° they dealt also, at least in theory, with those 
who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. 
The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was ex- 
pressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, 
while lamenting the encroachments of the common law 
courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanors 
as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of oppo- 
sition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of 
visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is 
suggested by the protests against the interference of the 
clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases 
which show that commercial transactions continued to be 
brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer 
was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies 
of social intercourse. “Thomas Wilkoxe,’”’ complained his 


162 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and disquieteth the 
parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, 
taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He 
has been cursed by his own father and mother. For the 
space of two years he hath not received the Holy Commun- 
ion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the 
Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving 
of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine 
service thrice in the year.’ °° Whether the archdeacon cor- 
rected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical 
usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.** 
Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other 
offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some York- 
shire parishes.*” Even in 1619 two instances occur in which 
money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commis- 
sary of the Bishop of London, on the charge of “lending 
upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly reported and 
cried out of.” One is excommunicated and afterwards ab- 
solved; both are admonished to amend their ways.” 

There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases 
were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occa- 
sional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the 
ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ec- 
clesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to 
the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a 
time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the 
whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the 
courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to 
which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or 
repudiated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn 
to the records which show how questions of business ethics 
were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by 
the Government. 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 163 


The opinion of the practical man on questions of eco- 
nomic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of 
even more than its customary confusion. A century be- 
fore, he had practised extortion and been told that it was 
wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century 
later, he was to practise it and be told that he was right; 
for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this 
matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two gen- 
erations which followed the Reformation were unblessed 
by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity 
where the glittering armor of theologians 


made 
A little glooming light, most like a shade. 


In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had 
arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which pre- 
ceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious 
burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled 
with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitu- 
dinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the con- 
fusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was 
represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England. 

As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, 
the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely 
from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from 
the individualism which was beginning to carry all before 
it among the leaders of the world of business. Against 
the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the 
stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bour- 
geoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the de- 
fence of customary relations against innovation, and who 
regarded the growth of this new power with something 
of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic 
radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was 


164 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for 
the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the 
small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its 
cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his vic- 
tims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the 
end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal 
capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been 
merged in a property-less proletariat, and “the riches of the 
city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at 
that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful 
heartsa 

Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted 
arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resent- 
ment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. 
Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional 
machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and 
dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him 
before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money 
from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, 
on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a 
monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the 
inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners.”’ 
The commonest charity of the age, which was the establish- 
ment of a fund to make advances without interest to trades- 
men, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to en- 
able the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim 
of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” 
without which he could not set up in business.*° 

The issues which confronted the Government were nat- 
urally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambigu- 
ous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in 
wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, 
the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the 
question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 165 


to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the 
divines.. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehen- 
sion of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress 
among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission 
as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled 
with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be 
made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural 
bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of 
economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy. 

In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, 
considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, 
were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social 
morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the 
Reformation the relations previously existing between the 
Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In 
the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, 
the ultimate authority on questions of public and private 
morality, while the latter was the police-officer which en- 
forced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church be- 
came the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion 
was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. 
But the religious revolution had not destroyed the concep- 
tion of a single society, of which Church and State were 
different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the 
_ King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of 
both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiasti- 
cal authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of 
political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional 
standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil 
called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Eccle- 
siastics, in their turn, were public officers—under Elizabeth 
the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace—and re- 
lied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious con- 
formity, but Christian morality, because both were elements 


166 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not 
yet been completely disentangled from each other. “We 
mean by the Commonwealth,’ wrote Hooker, “that so- 
ciety with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the 
matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same 
society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, 
without any other affairs besides.” °° 

In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the 
opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative 
reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives 
predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that 
of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes weil, 
continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, 
new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of 
politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, 
the number of niches into which each successive generation 
must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturb- 
ance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the 
object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, 
but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that 
Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy 
and industrial organization. Except when they were di- 
verted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and 
usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic de- 
velopment, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their 
enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since 
they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought 
to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for rea- 
sons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of 
religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relation- 
ships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive 
and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect 
all movements which menaced the established order, and 
alert to suppress them. 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 167 


Take but degree away, untune that string, 

And, hark, what discord follows! ... 

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong 
(Between whose endless jar justice resides) 

Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
Then every thing includes itself in power, 

Power into will, will into appetite; 

And appetite, an universal wolf, 

So doubly seconded with will and power, 

And, last, eat up himself. 


In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter 
part of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for 
long to express the official attitude. 

The practical application of such conceptions was an 
elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern 
analogy, “‘controls.”’ Wages, the movement of labor, the 
entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods 
of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange 
business, rates of interest—all are controlled, partly by 
Statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the 
Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to 
escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner 
take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncer- 
tainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? 
The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to hin- 
der him from asserting his rights at common law, will in- 
tervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor 
men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and in- 
timidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral 
pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound “rather 
to consider what is agreeable . . . to the use of this State 
and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the 
uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit 
maie take amonge his tenaunts.” °’ Have prices been raised 
by a bad harvest? The Council will issue a solemn denun- 


168 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


ciation of the covetousness of speculators, “in conditions 
more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural men,” ”® 
who take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessi- 
ties; will instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals 
to suspend exports; and will order justices to inspect barns, 
ration supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus stocks 
at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental mar- 
ket threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council 
will put pressure on clothiers to find work for the opera- 
tives, “this being the rule by which the wool-grower, the 
clothier and merchant must Le governed, that whosoever 
had a part of the gaine in profitable times . . . must now, 
in the decay of trade ... beare a part of the publicke 
losses, as may best conduce to the good of the publicke and 
the maintenance of the generall trade.” °’ Has the value of 
sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will 
consider pegging the exchanges, and will even attempt to 
nationalize foreign exchange business by prohibiting pri- 
vate transactions altogether.®® Are local authorities negli- 
gent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, 
which insists on regular reports as to the punishment of 
vagrants, the relief of the impotent, and the steps taken to 
provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied, inun- 
dates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with 
threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen 
in difficulties? The Council, which keeps sufficiently in 
touch with business conditions to know when the difficul- 
ties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a 
moderating influence by making an example of persons 
guilty of flagrant extortion, or by inducing the parties to 
accept a compromise. A mortgagee accused of “hard and 
unchristianly dealing’ is ordered to restore the land which 
he has seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor 
who has been similarly “hard and unconscionable” is com- 
mitted to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 169 


to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken “very un- 
just and immoderate advantage by way of usury.’ The 
bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese 
to show “a more Christian and charitable consideration of 
these his neighbors.”’ A nobleman has released two offend- 
ers imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province 
of York for having “taken usury contrary to the laws of 
God and of the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit 
them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of 
things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen 
may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual de- 
pression, the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors 
from pressing their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to 
create the impression of something like an informal morato- 
rium.°** 

The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the 
first two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising com- 
monplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glitter- 
ing facade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty 
declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public wel- 
fare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as 
slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was 
not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its osten- 
sible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional inter- 
ests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. 
Its fundamental conception, however—the philosophy of 
the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above im- 
mediate exigencies to consider the significance of the sys- 
tem in its totality—had a natural affinity with the doctrines 
which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of 
an ordered and graded society, in which each class per- 
formed its allotted function, and was secured such a liveli- 
hood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was propor- 
tioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,’’ wrote one who 
had labored much, amid grave personal dangers, for the 


170 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


welfare of his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge 
we have, but to doe services therfore amonge our neigh- 
bours abroade.”’ * The divines who fulminated against the 
uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middleman, 
the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw 
in the measures by which the Government endeavored to 
suppress the greed of individuals or the collision of classes: 
a much needed cement of social solidarity, and appealed to 
Cesar to redouble his penalties upon an economic license 
which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to 
prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order, 
and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threat- 
ened to destroy it, and reenforced the threat of temporal 
penalties with arguments that would not have been out of 
place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned with 
something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction 
of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the cor- 
porate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the 
State is something more than an institution created by ma- 
terial necessities or political convenience. It is the tem- 
poral expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link be- 
tween the individual soul and that supernatural society of 
which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests 
not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God. 

Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the 
most catholic, the most reasonable and the most sublime, 
is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a 
narrower mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet not 
without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all 
who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own 
ease, 1s revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud. 
Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need 
no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most 
powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a 
kind to commend him to those of its successor, and history 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 171 


has been hardly more merciful to him than were his political 
opponents. But an intense conviction. of the fundamental 
solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great community, 
a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate 
hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities 
and sectional interests—these qualities are not among the 
weaknesses against which the human nature of ordinary men 
requires to be most upon its guard, and these qualities Laud 
possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess. His wor- 
ship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a 
superstition. Church and State are one Jerusalem: “Both 
Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies, made up 
of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the 
Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Common- 
wealth; nay, so near, that the same men, which in a tem- 
poral respect make the Commonwealth, do in a spiritual 
make the Church.” °° Private and public interests are in- 
extricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. 
The foundation of unity is justice: “God will not bless 
the State, if kings and magistrates do not execute judg- 
ment, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out 
against the ‘thrones of justice.’ ” 

To a temper so permeated with the conception that so- 
ciety is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the 
grand end of government is to maintain their cooperation, 
every social movement or personal motive which sets group 
against group, or individual against individual, appears, not 
the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. 
The first demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments 
must “entertain no private business,” and “parties are ever 
private ends.” *° The second is the self-interest which leads 
the individual to struggle for siches and advancement. 
“There is no private end, but in something or other it will 
be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come in, though 
it be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’ it is no matter with them 


172 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.” °° For Laud, the 
political virtues, by which he understands subordination, 
obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for 
the good of the community, are as much part of the Chris- 
tian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike 
some of those who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready 
to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attain- 
ment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To 
talk of holiness and to practice injustice is mere hypocrisy. 
Man is born a member of a society and is dedicated by re- 
ligion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the obli- 
gation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism. 

“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect 
the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and 
wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For who- 
ever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, 
and in the body of the Church.” ®* To one holding such a 
creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than 
religious nonconformity, and its repression was a not less 
obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the sta- 
bility of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were 
one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud’s utterances and 
activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a 
strong bias in favor of the control of economic relations 
by an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the 
eleven years of personal government. It was a moment 
when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of pro- 
tecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly 
for less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was 
more than usually active in harrying the depopulating land- 
lord. The Council gave sympathetic consideration to peti- 
tions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and 
in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland 
counties to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, 
on the ground that they resulted in depopulation and were 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 173 


particularly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635, 
and 1636, three Commissions were- appointed and special 
instructions against enclosure were issued to the Justices of 
Assize. In parts of the country, at any rate, land which 
had been laid down to grass was plowed up in obedience 
to the Government’s orders. In the four years from 1635 
to 1638 a list of some 600 offenders was returned to the 
Council, and about £50,000 was imposed upon them in 
fines.°* With this policy Laud was whole-heartedly in sym- 
pathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in which he 
expresses his detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper 
which evoked Clarendon’s gentle complaint that the arch- 
bishop meade himself unpopular by his inclination “‘a little 
too much to countenance the Commission for Depopula- 
tion.” *° Laud was himself an active member of the Com- 
mission, and dismissed with impatient contempt the squire- 
archy’s appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin 
he was reminded by his enemies of the needlessly sharp 
censures with which he barbed the fine imposed upon an en- 
closing landlord.” 

The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely 
one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Gov- 
-ernment, unhampered by what Laud had called “that noise” 
of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor by even-handed 
pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, 
and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an un- 
conscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation 
of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food 
supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a 
lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described by 
Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against 
exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Un- 
win.” In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Eliza- 
bethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty 
to see that markets were served and prices controlled, ap- 


174 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


pointed a special committee of the Privy Council as Com- 
missioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, 
and issued a Book of Orders for the better administration 
of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it 
took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in 
East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment 
in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As 
President of the Council of the North, Wentworth pro- 
tected the commoners whose vested interests were threat- 
ened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavored to 
insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating 
the woollen industry.” 

Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious in- 
terest of the Government, which had enemies enough on its 
hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a 
kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference to the opin- 
ion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the. 
divine mission of the House of David to teach an obedient 
people “‘to lay down the private for the public sake.” It is 
not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an 
engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion with 
the remark that the defendant has been “guilty of a most 
foule offence, which the Prophet hath [called] in a very 
energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore,”’ and 
that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by “cruell 
men’’;“* or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy 
Council at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently 
not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers 
to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the 
Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Re- 
lief of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631." 

“A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of 
Lord Saye and Sele, “may preach the Gospel more publicly 
and to far greater edification in a court of judicature, or at 
a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw 


RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 175 


things to an issue, than many preachers in their several 
charges can.” * The Church, which had abandoned the pre- 
tension itself to control society, found some compensation 
in the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without 
influence in impressing the principles which were applied 
by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty 
—to use a question-begging phrase—in economic affairs 
follows somewhat the same course as does its growth in the 
more important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected 
with it. The conception of religion as a thing private and 
individual does not emerge until after a century in which 
religious freedom normally means the freedom of the State 
to prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to 
worship God as he pleases. The assertion of economic lib- 
erty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in 
which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a 
religious interpretation of social institutions was often sin- 
cerely held, the supernatural sanction had been increasingly 
merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and public ex- 
pediency. “Jerusalem ... stands not for the City and 
the State only ... nor for the Temple and the Church 
only, but jointly for both.” ** In identifying the mainte- 
nance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an 
incompetent Government, the Church had built its house 
upon the sand. It did not require prophetic gifts to foresee 
that the fall of the City would be followed by the destruction 
of the Temple. 7 


Ill, THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 


Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics 
continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to 
the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the 
voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The ex- 
pression of a theory of society which had made religion 


176 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis 
in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic 
fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the 
idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of 
ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was be- 
coming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent 
practice, and what still purported to be the teaching of the 
Church, is almost the commonest theme of the economic 
literature of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, 
indeed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say, 
men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices 
the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of 
Faith. But then, except in the great commercial centers 
and in the high finance of the Papacy and of secular Govern- 
ments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an 
occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an oppor- 
tunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth cen- 
tury was that devices that had formerly been occasional 
were now woven into the very texture of the industrial and 
commercial civilization which was developing in the later 
years of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expan- 
sion was to give English society its characteristic quality 
and tone. Fifty years later, Harrington, in a famous pas- 
sage, described how the ruin of the feudal nobility by the 
Tudors, by democratizing the ownership of land, had pre- 
pared the way for the bourgeois republic.” His hint of 
the economic changes which preceded the Civil War might 
be given a wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a 
steady growth of capitalism in textiles and mining, a great 
increase of foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock en- 
terprise in connection with it, the beginnings of something 
like deposit banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the 
growth, aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s 
own financial necessities, of a money-market with an al- 
most modern technique—speculation, futures and arbitrage 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 177 


transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes 
who sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of 
commerce in the later years of the century, and whose re- 
ligious and political aspirations were, two generations later, 
to overthrow the monarchy. 

An organized money-market has many advantages. But 
it is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility. 
Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of oppor- 
tunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a 
solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of 
the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among 
neighbors, which regarded keen bargaining as “sharp prac- 
tice.” In the half-century which followed the Reformation, 
thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international mar- 
ket, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign 
debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign 
exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians. 
Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more read- 
ily than most economic questions to discussion in terms of 
mechanical causation. It was in the long debate provoked 
by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges, 
that the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards 
to be treated by economists as of self-evident and universal 
validity, were first hammered out. 

“We see,’ wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or en- 
forceth another, like as in a clock where there are many 
wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and 
that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the 
instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going 
in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next 
to him, and the next by him that followeth him.” 7° The 
spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly de- 
scribed. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a 
soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denun- 
ciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be 


178 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who 
bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took 
a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with 
the warning that “the devices of men cannot be concealed 
from Almighty God.’ To a great clothier, or to a capital- 
ist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who man- 
aged the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments 
were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad 
morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world 
where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty 
of an unfortunate neighbor, but as a profitable investment 
on the part of not too scrupulous business men, who looked 
after themselves and expected others to do the same, they 
had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the 
spirit of mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of 
neighbors who formed the ordinary village or borough in 
rural England. 

It was a natural result of their experience that, without 
the formal enunciation of any theory of economic indi- 
vidualism, they should throw their weight against the tra- 
ditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers 
and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and 
“good conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large- 
scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more 
into accordance with their economic practice. The opposi- 
tion to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the 
self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter 
years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of 
Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, ex- 
pressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the pur- 
pose of giving it a rest.” From at any rate the middle of 
the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities 
and by the Government was regarded with skepticism by 
the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the 
end of the century it produced complaints that, since it 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 179 


weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results 
were the precise opposite of those intended.*° As markets 
widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and 
grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistak- 
able signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked 
the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that finan- 
ciers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans 
should be indemnified against legal proceedings.** Nor 
could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the 
City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: ‘What 
man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne pos- 
session for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his 
owne the best he can?’ * With such a wind of doctrine 
in their sails men were not far from the days of complete 
freedom of contract. 

Most significant of all, economic interests were already 
appealing to the political theory which, when finally sys- 
tematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which in- 
terferes with property and business destroys its own title 
to exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the 
House of Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to 
their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in 
those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby 
they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest 
of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all 
the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the 
subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some 
few.” *° The process by which natural justice, imperfectly 
embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of 
authority by positive law which might or might not be the 
expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the rejec- 
tion by social theory of the whole conception of an objective 
standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been 
invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon eco- 
nomic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a signifi- 


180 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


cant revolution had taken place. “Nature” had come to: 
connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and 
natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age 
as a reason why self-interest should be given free play. 

The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual 
changes was seen in.a reversal of policy on the part of the 
State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all 
interest as “‘a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers 
places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had 
been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed 
the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had 
triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that 
the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.** 
The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, pro- 
vided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent., though it 
still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of 
his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future 
advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment 
made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation 
of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon 
religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the 
Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church 
to be more fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if 
without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and 
it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the de- 
grees have been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of 
Parliament.. Objective economic science was beginning its 
disillusioning career, in the form of discussions on the rise 
in prices, the mechanism-of the money-market, and the 
balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a 
moral, but to analyze forces so productive of profit to those 
interested in their operation. Since Calvin’s indulgence to 
interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that 
religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice. 

Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 181 


the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the di- 
vines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century, 
though they did not dream of abandoning the denuncia- 
tion of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it 
with qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which 
three English translations were made in the ten years fol- 
lowing his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required 
to be obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, in- 
dicated a via media. As uncompromising as any medieval 
writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces 
with all the old fervor oppressive contracts which grind the 
poor. But he is less intolerant of economic motives than 
most of his predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, 
before interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to 
consider both the terms of the loan and the position of bor- 
rower and lender. 

The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling 
to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conserva- 
tive divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 
1571 declaring that “all usurie being forbydden by the lawe 
of God is synne and detestable,” to argue that the Statute 
had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to 
the Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of prac- 
tical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which 
it did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obe- 
dience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a 
cure until he is assured that the money which will be paid 
to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on 
capital.** But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson 
of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which 
is “set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year,” 
the money being used for their assistance. But the arrange- 
ment has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this 
communal cow is ‘‘very like to have perished through cas- 
ualty and ill-keeping.’’ ** Will not the poor be surer of 


182 ‘ THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? Sa 
it is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest 
spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to in- 
vest money in business in order to provide an income for 
those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it 
themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share 
in trading profits, what is the particular criminality of 
charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who 
may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put 
money into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the 
advance to corner the wool crop or to speculate on the ex- 
changes? 

To such questions liberal theologians answered that the 
crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the 
breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian 
charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their op- 
ponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the 
Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, 
but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, 
were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not 
extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be 
interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the prin- 
cipal.” The literature of the subject was voluminous. But 
it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether 
theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only 
some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assump- 
tion implied in their very disagreement had been that eco- 
nomic relations belonged to a province of which, in the 
last resort, the Church was master. That economic trans- 
actions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be 
judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, 
whatever concessions the State might see fit to make to hu- 
man frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was 
involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was 
the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 183 


be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their 
social obligations—such doctrines were still common ground 
to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this 
whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on re- 
ligion which was being discredited. While rival authori- 
ties were discussing the correct interpretation of economic 
ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a 
powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics 
were one thing and ethics another. 

Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was 
the issue in which the whole controversy over “good con- 
science” in bargaining came to a head, and such questions 
were only one illustration of the immense problems with 
which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a 
Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the 
Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, 
garnished with citations from Scripture and from the can- 
onists, were written to answer them. Many of them are 

~ learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted 
whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but 
their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity 
with which it was held that the transactions of business 
must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of 
practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been 
forged to meet the conditions of a very different environ- 
ment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth 
century. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political 
questions is that which turns on the difference between pub- 
lic and private morality. The problem which it presents in 
the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since 
its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral stand- 
ard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to 
those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in 
a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as 


184 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no 
longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in 
the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for busi- 
ness and another for private life, is to open a door to an 
orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. ‘To 
argue that there is no difference at all is to lay down a 
principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in 
practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable appli- 
cation, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself 
to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. 
The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent 
reaction towards the baser kinds of Realpolitik. 

With the expansion of finance and international trade in 
the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the 
Church. Granted that I should love my neighbor as my- 
self, the questions which, under modern conditions of large- 
scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely 
is my neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love 
for him effective in practice? To these questions the con- 
ventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had 
not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to 
moralize economic relations by treating every transaction 
as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsi- 
bility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and 
a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social 
doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, 
when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought 
out again from the beginning and formulated in new and 
living terms. It had endeavored to protect the peasant and 
the craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender 
and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage- 
earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with 
meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of 
master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted 
that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it te 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 185 


point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism 
which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, 
the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans 
whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or the American 
Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian 
craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at star- 
vation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console it- 
self for the practical difficulty of applying its moral prin- 
ciples by clasping the comfortable formula that for the 
transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, 
for the problems involved in the association of men for 
economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be in- 
creasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines ad- 
vanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, 
little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared ay 
way for their theoretical abandonment. | 

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they de- 
served to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church 
had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased 
to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in 
economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of 
the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the 
Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the 
choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned 
in a shriveled mass of desiccated formule, it will choose 
the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelli- 
gence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting 
with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above 
all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was 
to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social 
theory of the Church of England turned its face from the 
practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their orig- 
inal authors been as impervious to realities as their later 
exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally 


186 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


it was shouldered aside. It was neglected because it had 
become negligible. 

The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in coun- 
tries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan move- 
ment, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to 
prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were 
all three, and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the 
sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted 
to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a temper 
which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, 
above all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic mat- 
ters. It was not merely that there was the familiar ob- 
jection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of 
business—that “‘it is not in simple divines to show what con- 
tract is lawful and what is not.” *’ More important, there 
was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least, 
of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 
1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were 
endeavoring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical 
courts to testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged 
that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to stop 
proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of 
Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.*° 
“As things are,’ wrote two years later the author of a trea- 
tise on the civil and ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction 
knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, 
in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two king- 
domes.” *° The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commis- 
sion suffered in the same way. In the last resort appeals 
from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the Court 
of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century 
down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the 
judges were from time to time staying proceedings before 
the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharg- 
ing offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 187 


released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed 
by the High Commission on a charge of usury.°° 

Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a 
theory of the Church, which denied the very principle of a 
discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The ac- 
quiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the 
clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for 
two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth 
under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which 
had its stronghold among the trading and commercial 
classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable proportion 
of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike 
of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its 
occasional interference in matters of business. But their 
attitude had as an inevitable result that, with the disparage- 
ment of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical 
discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It 
was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social 
relations. On the contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, 
at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of the 
individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But 
it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which 
such discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury 
Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House of Com- 
mons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest 
that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abol- 
ished, and that “they should be no more remembered than 
they are followed.” ** Feeling against the system rose stead- 
ily during the next two generations; excommunications, 
when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disre- 
garded; ** and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, 
under the influence of Laud’s régime, the murmur was 
threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long 
Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the 
interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation 


188 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the 
ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and 
finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them 
away altogether. 

“Not many good days,’ wrote Penn, “since ministers 
meddled so much in laymen’s business.” °* That sentiment 
was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cava- 
lier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not 
only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any 
case had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of 
religion which regarded it as involving the control of eco- 
nomic self-interest by what Laud had called “the body of 
the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Tay- 
lor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force 
and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his 
faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in 
bargaining and in works of mercy to his neighbors.** But 
the conception that the Church possessed, of its own au- 
thority, an independent standard of social values, which it 
could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the eco- 
nomic world, grew steadily weaker. The result, neither im- 
mediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of 
spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in 
the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of 
religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, 
that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and paralyz- 
ing of theories. It may be called Indifferentism. 

The change had begun before the Civil War. It was 
completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the 
Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost super- 
fluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as 
to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, 
and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the 
Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 189 


may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been 
abandoned. 

An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own 
inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. 
What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth cen- 
tury was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had 
come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was 
to be expected in the first great age of English natural sci- 
ence—the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal So- 
ciety—drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, 
but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the po- 
litical theory associated with the name of Locke, but popu- 
larized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is 
not a community of classes with varying functions, united 
to each other by mutual obligations arising from their re- 
lation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather 
than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders 
are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the 
rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of na- 
ture. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernat- 
ural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and 
fulfills its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual 
freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise. 

The most important of such rights are property rights, 
and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, 
exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tan- 
gible, material ‘“stock’’ of society. Those who do not sub- 
scribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the 
profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of 
their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats 
almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders as “‘the 
poor’—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, 
“the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the 
idle poor,’ who work for themselves. Hence the unending 


190 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


discussions as to whether “the laboring poor’ are to be 
classed among the “productive” or “unproductive” classes 
—whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. 
Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any 
substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by 
any kind of public policy. “It would be easier, where prop- 
erty was well secured, to live without money than without 
poor, . . . who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so 
they should receive nothing worth saving’’; the poor “have 
nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, 
which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure’; “to make 
society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be 
wretched as well as poor.” ** Such sentences from a work 
printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which 
show how the wind is blowing. 

In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low 
and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was 
an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious 
thought was not immune from the same influence. It was 
not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, 
was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the 
temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class 
organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too 
often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience 
to wealth and social position, which, after more than half 
a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic 
and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the 
fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it 
accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its 
teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in 
the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious 
thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile 
pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted 
with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a 
distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 19] 


The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a 
general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prev- 
alent religious thought might not unfairly be described as 
morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by 
a tather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the 
natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated 
teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regu- 
lating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of eco- 
nomic motives, for the theory which had regarded society 
as an organism composed of different classes united by their 
common subordination to a spiritual purpose. 

Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic har- 
mony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope 
for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, 
indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early com- 
mercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial 1m- 
morality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which 
might have been expected to shock even the not over-sensi- 
tive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries 
before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and — 
theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered 
the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In 
reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spec- 
tacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been 
worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England 
of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it 
seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the 
Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer 
and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the 
popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,°* first pub- 
lished in 1658, and widely read during the following cen- 
tury, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the 
attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If 
preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with 
the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth- 


192 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


century writer in the words, “trade is one thing and re- 
ligion is another,” they imply a not very different conclu- 
sion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions be- 
tween them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, 
which left little room for religious teaching as to economic 
morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized 
by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible 
hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of 
a providential plan. “National commerce, good morals and 
good government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warbur- 
ton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his 
religion, “ are but part of one general scheme, in the designs 
of Providence.” . 

Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the 
Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound mor- 
ality coincided with commercial wisdom. ‘The existing or- 
der, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Gov- 
ernments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the 
order established by nature was the order established by 
God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, 
would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of 
Pope: 


Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, 
And bade self-love and social be the same. 


Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical exam- 
ination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian 
charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for 
philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger 
area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of 
self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of 
conduct. It was, therefore, in the sphere of providing suc- 
cor for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in 
inspiring the main army, that the social work of the Church 


THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 193 


was conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the 
eighteenth century were the relief of the poor, the care of 
the sick, and the establishment of schools. In spite of the 
genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual 
weliare of the poorer classes, which inspired the Evangelical 
revival, religion abandoned the fundamental brain-work of 
criticism and construction to the rationalist and the hu- 
manitarian. 

Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church 
should not have been more effective in giving inspiration 
and guidance during the immense economic reorganization 
to which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name 
of the “Industrial Revolution.” It did not give it, because 
it did not possess it. There were, no doubt, special condi- 
tions to account for its silence—mere ignorance and ineffi- 
ciency, the supposed teachings of political economy, and, 
after 1790, the terror of all humanitarian movements in- 
spired by France. But the explanation of its attitude is to 
be sought, less in the peculiar circumstances of the moment, 
than in the prevalence of a temper which accepted the es- 
tablished order of class relations as needing no vindication 
before any higher tribunal, and which made religion, not its 
critic or its accuser, but its anodyne, its apologist, and its 
drudge. It was not that there was any relapse into ab- 
normal inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the 
Church possessed an independent standard of values, to 
which social institutions were amenable, had been aban- 
doned. The surrender had been made long before the bat- 
tle began. The spiritual blindness which made possible the 
general acquiescence in the horrors of the early factory sys- 
tem was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century. 





CHAPTER IV 


‘THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.” 
Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale’s translation). 








CHAPTER IV 
THE PURITAN MOVEME})1 


By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between re- “ 
ligious theory and economic realities had long been evident. 
But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious theory - 
itself, a new system of ideas was being matured, which was 
destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to turn 
on the whole field of social obligations a new and penetrat- 
ing light. Ona world heaving with expanding energies, and 
on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two generations 
of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous storm of the 
Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks snapped; the 
dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither all of winter 
nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving, pitiless and 
tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and contrition, 
as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in Meshec, which 
signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signifies Blackness ; 
while amid the blare of trumpets, and the clash of arms, and 
the rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to 
God and haughty to man, the soldier-saints swept over bat- 

tlefield and scaffold their garments rolled in blood. 
Inthe great silence which fell when the Titans had turned 
to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a 
voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a con- 
siderable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial 

view.” * A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And 
this new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the pas- 
sion of the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous 
and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and com- 
monplace cupidities, was one in which, since ‘“Thorough” 

107 


198 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


was no more, since property was secure, and contracts in- 
violable, and the executive tamed, the judicious investments 
of business men were likely to yield a profitable return. So 
the epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success, 
mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, 

_ but for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint. 


I. PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 


The principal streams which descended in England from 
the teaching of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Con- 
gregationalism, and a doctrine \of the nature of God and 
man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, 
more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three 
off-shoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which 
had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped, 
with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into 
a State Church, was to produce a credal statement carved 
in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, 
but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the 
right of every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom 
of all Churches from the interference of the State, was to 
leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperish- 
able legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was 
Puritanism,  Straitened to no single sect, and represented 
in the Anglican Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in 
those which afterwards separated from it, it determined, not 
only conceptions of theology and church government, but 
political aspirations, business relations, family life and the 
minutie of personal behavior. 

The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan » 
spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seven- — 
teenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from 
Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from 
its struggle against the old order that an England which is 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 199 


unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its 
accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its 
achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but |C 
the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, 
which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only be- 
cause sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, 
the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and 
State was less than that which it worked in men’s souls, 
and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of 
Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the 
lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the 
Lord to wring a blessing before he fled. 


We do it wrong, being so majestical 
To offer it the show of violence. 


In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding mel- 
ancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious 
tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,”’ 
amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths 
of light and darkness which posterity can observe with rev- 
erence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line can- 
not plumb. 

There are types of character which are like a prism, whose 
various and brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a 
single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spir- 
itual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward 
and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in 
market-place and counting-house and camp than in the stu- 
dent’s chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. 
For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sac- 
ramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacra- 
ment. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to ex-: 
orcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save 
his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above}C 
or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expand- 


200 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


ing spirit, he remakes, not only his own character and hab- 
its and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, 
political institutions and social order. Conscious that he 1s 
but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory 
life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror 
from the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls 
dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with anguish 
of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and 
damnation. ‘‘It made the world seem to me,” said a Puri- 
tan of his conversion, “as a carkass that had neither life 
nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires 
after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. 
. . . It set me upon that method of my studies which since 
then I have found the benefit of. . . . It caused me first to 
seek God’s Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to 
mind the One thing needful, and to determine first of my 
Ultimate End.” ? 

Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puri- 
tan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The con- 
templation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen de- 
scribed as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great 
for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify 
him by their work in a world given over to the powers of 
darkness. ‘The way to the Celestial City lies just through 
this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go 
to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go 
out of the world.”*® For that awful journey, girt with 
precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, 
and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, 
books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be 
cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and 
maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. 
He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who 
may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his 
ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and 


‘Whe 
e, 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 201 


warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in 
early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation 
for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intel- 
lect ; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but 
much praying causes devotion’ * that the powers of this 
world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that 


blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, ~ 


systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword 


a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He Yo 


-makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too 
is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor. 
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of 


displeasing God than all the world,” ® he is a natural re- “ 


publican, for there is none on earth that he can own as mas- 
ter. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; 
if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins 
the elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the 
end, all these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of 
self and mastery of others, wounds, and death—may be too 
little for the salvation of a single soul. ‘Then I saw that 
there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, 
as well as from the City of Destruction” “—those dreadful 
words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break 
his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to the chief 
of sinners, they nerve his will. For it is will—will organized 
and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration 


or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the 


essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and or- 
ganization of will every instrument in that tremendous ar- 
senal of religious fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like 


a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters | 


every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too 
tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shat- 
ters itself. 

The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every so- 


ay, 
» 


202 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


cial grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from 
aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as they 
stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie 
one another.”* But, if religious zeal and moral enthu- 
siasm are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class 
and income, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are 
certain kinds of environment in which they burn more 
bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and 
body, so different types of religious experience correspond 
to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux. 


‘To contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit 


seemed to be those classes in society which combined eco- 


nomic independence, education and a certain decent pride in 
“their status, revealed at once in a determination to live their 


» 


‘own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a 


somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through 


weakness of character or through economic helplessness, were 


less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. 
Such, where the feudal spirit had been weakened by con- 
tact with town life and new intellectual currents, were some 
of the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, 
“mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,” * espe- 
cially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such, above 
all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those rural 
districts which had been partially industrialized by the de- 
centralization of the textile and iron industries. 

“The King’s cause and party,’ wrote one who described 
the situation in Bristol in 1645, “were favored by two ex- 
tremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men, 
the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by 
the middle rank, the true and best citizens.” ® That it was 
everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of 
Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher’s statistical es- 
timate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the first 
decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 203 


ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London 
and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of 
Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 
to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the 
country.*° The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the 
comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of pro- 
founder spiritual import than sociological generalization. 
“Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,’ wrote Baxter, 
“and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other 
called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the 
King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) 
the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most 
of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; 
especially in those corporations and counties which depend 
on cloathing and such manufactures.’ He explained the 
fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence 
with the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of 
France, where it was ‘‘the merchants and middle sort of 
men that were Protestants.” ** 

The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, 
which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which 
continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence “‘the 
rebellious city,’ returning four Dissenters to the Royalist 
Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to ac- 
company Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill 
from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian 
ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nurs- 
ing the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and shel- 
tering the Whig leaders against the storm which 
broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was 
to be observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile 
critic, was “by meanes of the City of London (the nest and 
seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its uni- 
versall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities 
conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities 


204 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


and corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties.” ** 


In Lancashire, the clothing towns—‘the Genevas of Lan- 
cashire’’—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding 
sea Of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds 
and Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham.and Leicester ; in 
the west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of 
the west of England textile industry, were all centers of 
Puritanism, 

The identification of the industrial and commercial classes 
with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of 
Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an 
additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon com- 
mented bitterly on the “factious humor which possessed 
most corporations, and the pride of their wealth’; ** and, 
after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of 
the boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop 
of Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against show- 
ing them any favor, on the ground that “trading combina- 
tions’ were “so many nests of faction and sedition,’ and 
that “‘our late miserable distractions’ were ‘“‘chiefly hatched 
in the shops of tradesmen.” ** Pepys commented dryly on 
the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they re- 
turned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the 
courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a provi- 
dential instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.” 

When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fash- 
ion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the 
last half-century and by the example of Holland—the eco- 
nomic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to in- 
quire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the re- 
lations between economic progress and other aspects of the 
national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the 
drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of 
gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but 
deduced from it different conclusions. The question which 


wn 


~ 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 205 


gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of 
religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual sig- 
nificance, they found a practical reason for applauding it 
in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puri- 
tan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its 
most prominent victims, were also those who led commer- 
cial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, 
was simple. <A society of peasants could be homogeneous 


in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple 


uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided 
business community could escape constant friction and ob- 
struction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from 
a multitude of different sources, and if each of those ele- 
ments were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in that 
age the same thing—to practice its own religion. 

Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything 
and invented nothing, and English economic organization 
had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers 
flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But 
the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accom- 
modating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home- 
bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of 
Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought 
diversity of trades more important than unity of religion, 
had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maid- 
stone, Sandwich and Canterbury,*® and the problem recurred 
in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. “The 
gaols were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen 
and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced from their houses, 
and thousands of workmen and women whom they em- 
ployed set to starving.” **7 The Whig indictment of the dis- 
astrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by 
French intendants of the widespread distress which followed 
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.*® 

When the collision between economic interests and the 


moe A 


bee 
i \ 


206 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


policy of compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not 
surprising that the economists of the age should have enun- 
ciated the healing principle that persecution was incompat- 
ible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of eco- 
nomic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every 
law of this nature,’ wrote the author of a pamphlet on the 
subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles 
and rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but is also “destructive 
to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing 
and driving away the most industrious working hands, and 
depopulating, and thereby impoverishes our country, which 
is capable of employing ten times the number of people we 
now have.” *® 3 

Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Neth- 
erlands, found one reason of their success in the fact that, 
Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise 
what religion he pleased.*® De la Court, whose striking 
book passed under the name of John de Witt, said the 
same.** Petty, after pointing out that in England the most 
thriving towns were those where there was most noncon- 
formity, cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India 
and the Ottoman Empire, to prove that,‘ while economic — 
progress is compatible with any religion, the class which 
is its vehicle will always consist of the heterodox minority, 
who “profess opinions different from what are publicly es- 
tablished.” *’ “There is a kind of natural unaptness,” wrote 
a pamphleteer in 1671, “in the Popish religion to business, 
whereas on the contrary among the Reformed, the greater 
their zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and indus- 
try, as holding idleness unlawful. . . . The domestic in- 
terest of England lieth in the advancement of trade by re- 
moving all obstructions both in city and country, and pro- 
viding such laws as may help it, and make it most easy, es- 
pecially in giving liberty of conscience to all Protestant Non- 
conformists, and denying it to Papists.’’ ** 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 207. 


If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good 
for trade, the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was 
aggravated by the fact that it was they who were most vocal 
in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of 
the same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought to 
make no distinction between Protestants’ and the policy 
“of preferring, on all occasions, the monied interests before 
the Janded.” ** Even later in the eighteenth century, the 
stale gibe of “the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other 
corporations” still figured in the pamphlets of the statesman 
whom Lord Morley describes as the prince of political char- 
latans, Bolingbroke.” 

“The middle _ranks,”’ “the middle class of men,’ “the 
middle sort’—such social strata included, of course, the 
widest variety of economic interest and personal position. 
But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil 
War, two causes prevented the phrase from being merely the 
vapid substitute for thought which it is today. In the first 
place, outside certain exceptional industries and districts, 
there was little large-scale production and no massed prole- 
tariat of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typ- 
ical workman was still normally a small master, who con- 
tinued himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and 
_ whose position was that described in Baxter’s Kidderminster, 
where “there were none of the tradesmen very rich... 
the magistrates of the town were few of them worth £40 
per annum, and most not half so much; three or four of the 
richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 
to £600 in twenty years, and it may be lost £100 of it at 
once by an ill debtor.” *° Differing in wealth from the 
prosperous merchant or clothier, such men resembled them 
in economic and social habits, and the distinction between 
them was one of degree, not of kind. In the world of in- 
dustry vertical divisions between district and district still 
cut deeper than horizontal fissures between class and class. 


208 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


The number of those who could reasonably be described as 
independent, since they owned their own tools and con- 
trolled their own businesses, formed a far larger proportion 
of the population than is the case in capitalist societies. 

The second fact was even more decisive. The business 
classes, as a power in the State, were still sufficiently young 
to be conscious of themselves as something like a separate 
order, with an outlook on religion and politics peculiarly 
their own, distinguished, not merely by birth and breeding, 
but by their social habits, their business discipline, the whole 
bracing atmosphere of their moral life, from a Court which 
they believed to be godless and an aristocracy which they 
knew to be spendthrift. The estrangement—for it was no 
more—was of shorter duration in England than in any other 
European country, except Switzerland and Holland. By 
the latter part of the seventeenth century, partly as a result 
of the common struggles which made the Revolution, still 
more perhaps through the redistribution of wealth by com- 
merce and finance, the former rivals were on the way to be 
compounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy embracing 
both. The landed gentry were increasingly sending their 
sons into business; ‘‘the tradesman meek and much a liar” 
looked forward, as a matter of course, to buying an estate 
from a bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to astonish 
foreign observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the 
Paradise of the bourgeoisie, in which the prosperous mer- 
chant shouldered easily aside the impoverished bearers of 
aristocratic names.”” 

That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great 
divide of the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer 
glories of the Revolution. In the germinating period of Pu- 
ritanism, the commercial classes, though powerful, were not 
yet the dominant force which a century later they were 
to become. They could look back on a not distant past, 
in which their swift rise to prosperity had been regarded 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 209 


with suspicion, as the emergence of an alien interest, which 
applied sordid means to the pursuit of anti-social ends— 
an interest for which in a well-ordered commonwealth there 
was little room, and which had been rapped on the knuckles 
by conservative statesmen. They lived in a present, where 
a Government, at once interfering, inefficient and extrava- 
gant, cultivated, with an intolerable iteration of grandilo- 
quent principles, every shift and artifice most repugnant to 
the sober prudence of plain-dealing men. The less reputable 
courtiers and the more feather-pated provincial gentry, while 
courting them to raise a mortgage or renew a loan, reviled 
them as parvenus, usurers and blood-suckers. Even in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century, the influence of the 
rentier and of the financier still continued to cause appre- 
hension and jealousy, both for political and for economic 
reasons. “By this single stratagem,’ wrote an indignant 
pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who specialized in 
money-lending, “they avoyd all contributions of tithes and 
taxes to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to 
tender consciences ) ; they decline all services and offices of 
burthen incident to visible estates ; they escape all oaths and 
ties of publick allegiance or private fealty. . . . They en- 
joy both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and withal 
the spiritual comfort of thriving easily and devoutly... 
leaving their adversaries the censures of improvidence, to- 
gether with the misery of decay. They keep many of the 
nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copy- 
holders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice and oft- 
times protects them in their boldest conceptions. By en- 
grossing cash and credit, they in effect give the price to land 
and law to markets. By commanding ready money, they 
likewise command such offices as they widely affect... 
they feather and enlarge their own nests, the corporations.”’ *° 

Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity 
against equestrian upstarts or of the moblesse against the 


Oto “THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


roturter, were natural in a conservative aristocracy, which 
' for a century had felt authority and prestige slipping from 
its grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them 
by resigning itself, as ultimately it did, to sharing them 
with its rival. In return, the business world, which had its 
own religious and political ideology, steadily gathered the 
realities of power into its own hands; asked with a sneer, 
“how would merchants thrive if gentlemen would not be 
unthriftes” ; °° and vented the indignant contempt felt by an 
energetic, ical and, according to its lights, not too un- 
scrupulous, generation for a class of fainéants, unversed in 
the new learning of the City and incompetent to the verge 
of immorality in the management of business affairs. Their 
triumphs in the past, their strength in the present, their 
confidence in the future, their faith in themselves, and 
their difference from their feebler neighbours—a difference 
as of an iron wedge in a lump of clay—made them, to use 
a modern phrase, class-conscious. Like the modern pro- 
letarian, who feels that, whatever his personal misery and 
his present disappointments, the Cause is rolled forward 
to victory by the irresistible force of an inevitable evolu- 
tion, the Puritan bourgeoisie knew that against the chosen 
people the gates of hell could not prevail. The Lord pros- 
pered their doings. 

There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of 
society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny 
dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of con- 
flict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that 
enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with 
ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but 
what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would 
be. The feudal noblesse had looked, and had caught a 
glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and honor. The 
monarchy looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for it; they 
saw a nation drinking the blessings of material prosperity 


PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 211 


and spiritual edification from the cornucopia of a sage and 
paternal monarchy—a nation “fortified and adorned... . 
the country rich... the Church flourishing .. . trade 
increased to that degree that we were the exchange of Chris- 
tendom . . . all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as 
their own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this 
Kingdom.” *° In a far-off day the craftsman and laborer 
were to look, and see a band of comrades, where fellowship 
should be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. 
For the middle classes of the early seventeenth century, ris- 
ing but not yet triumphant, that enchanted mirror was Puri- 
tanism. What it showed was a picture grave to sternness,| 
yet not untouched with a sober exaltation—an earnest, zeal- 
ous, godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in labor, | 
constant in prayer, thrifty and thriving, filled with a decent 


iron Protestantism—‘“thinking, sober, and patient men, and 


pride in themselves and their calling, assured that strenuous | 


toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those Dutch Cal- | 
vinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their | 


such as believe that labor and industry is their duty towards | 


God.” ** Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It 
was long before any questioned it again. 


II. A GODLY DISCIPLINE Versus THE RELIGION OF TRADE 


Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle — 


classes. It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without eradi- 
cating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpug- 
nable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood 
the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Provi- 


dence, without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could - 


beat upon the forge, not a figure could be added to the 
ledger. But it is a strange school which does not teach 
more than one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism, 
trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summa- 


212 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


rized in the simple formula that it fostered individualism. 
Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Cal- 
| vinism, in its English version, was the parent of capitalism, 
and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have 
lent to the same interpretation the weight of their consid- 
erable authority.*® But the heart of man holds mysteries 
of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility to- 
gether. When the shriveled tissues lie in our hand, the 
spiritual bond still eludes us. 

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individual- 
ist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each 
there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of 
the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for 
common action. There was in Puritanism an element which 
was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which 
was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron 
discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savor- 
less mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which 
would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine reck- 
lessness which would make all things new. For long nour- 
ished together, their discords concealed, in the furnace of 
the Civil War they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Inde- 
pendent, aristocrat and Leveller, politician and merchant and 
utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange mon- 
-sters with whom they had walked as friends. Then the 
splendors and illusions vanished; the force of common 
things prevailed; the metal cooled in the mould; and the 
Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendors and its illusions, set- 
tled finally into its decent bed of equable respectability. But 
each element in its social philosophy had once been as vital 
as the other, and the battle was fought, not between a Puri- 
/ tanism solid for one view and a State committed to another, 
but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism it- 
self. The problem is to grasp their connection, and to un- 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 213 


derstand the reasons which caused this to wax and that to 
wane. 

“The triumph of Puritanism,’ it has been said, “swept 
away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employ- 
ment of money.” ** That it swept away the restrictions im- 
posed by the existing machinery is true; neither ecclesiastical 
courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber, could 
function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of the 
Church of Laud and the State of Strafford, it did so but as 
a step towards erecting a more rigorous discipline of its 
own. It would have been scandalized by economic individ- 
ualism as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad out- 
lines of its scheme of organization favored unrestricted lib- 
erty in matters of business as little as in the things of the 
spirit. To the Puritan of any period in the century between 
the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion 
that he was the friend of economic or social license would 
have seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have ap- 
peared to most of his critics, who taunted him, except in the 
single matter of usury, with an intolerable meticulousness. 

A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puri- 
tan covenant. Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, 
its vital necessity had been the theme of the Joshuas of 
Scotland, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish 
edition of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed 
treatises expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the 
established ecclesiastical order.** The word “discipline” im- 
plied essentially ‘a directory of Church government,” estab- 
lished in order that ‘‘the wicked may be corrected with ec- 
clesiastical censures, according to the quality of the fault” ; *° 
and’ the proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth cen- 
tury show that the conception of a rule of life, to be en- 
forced by the pressure of the common conscience, and in 
the last resort by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of 
their system.’ When, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, 


214 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


the sectaries in London described their objects as not merely 
the “free and pure” preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure 
ministration of the sacraments, but ‘“‘to have, not the fylthye 
cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable 
to the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good 
Lorde Jesus Chryste,” *° the antithesis suggests that some- 
thing more than verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft 
noted that it was the practice, when a sin was committed 
by one of the faithful, for the elders to apply first admon- 
ishment and then excommunication. The minute-book of 
one of the few classes whose records survive confirms his 
statement.** 
~All this early movement had almost flickered out before 
the end of the sixteenth century. But the conception lay 
at the very root of Presbyterianism, and it reemerged in 
the system of church government which the supercilious 
Scotch Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered 
to inconclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and 
Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of 
High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all per- 
sons in Holy Orders, and finally, with the abolition of 
episcopacy, of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a 
vacuum. “Mr. Henderson,” wrote the insufferable Baillie, 
“has ready now a short treatise, much called for, of our 
church discipline.” ** In June 1646 an unenthusiastic Par- 
liament accepted the ordinance which, after a three years’ 
debate of intolerable tedium, emerged from the Assembly’s 
Committee on the Discipline and Government of the Church, 
and which provided for the suspension by the elders of 
persons guilty of scandalous offences. Detested by the In- 
dependents and cold-shouldered by Parliament, which had 
no intention of admitting the divine right of presbyteries, 
the system never took deep root, and in London, at least, 
there appears to be no evidence of any exercise of jurisdic- 
tion by elders or classes. In parts of Lancashire, on the 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 215 


other hand, it seems to have been actively at work, down, 
at any rate, to 1649. The change in the political situation, 
in particular the triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. 
Shaw thinks, from functioning longer.*® 

“Discipline” included all questions of moral conduct, and 
of these, in an age when a great mass of economic relations 
were not the almost automatic reactions of an impersonal 
mechanism, but a matter of human kindliness or meanness 
between neighbors in village or borough, economic conduct 
was naturally part.’ Calvin and Beza, perpetuating with a 
new intensity the medieval idea of a Church-civilization, 
had sought to make Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal 
purity, but of social righteousness and commercial morality. 
Those who had drunk from their spring continued, in even 
less promising environments, the same tradition. Bucer, 
who wrote when something more fundamental than a poli- 
tician’s reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with 
their eyes on Geneva, had urged the reconstruction of every 
side of the economic life of a society which was to be 
Church and State in one.*® English Puritanism, while ac- 
cepting after some hesitation Calvin’s much qualified con- 
donation of moderate interest, did not intend in other re- 
spects to countenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings. 
Knewstub appealed to the teaching of “that worthy instru- 
ment of God, Mr. Calvin,” to prove that the habitual usurer 
ought to be “thrust out of the society of men.” Smith em- 
broidered the same theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost him 
his professorship, denounced the “usual practice amongst 
rich men, and some of the greater sort, who by lending, or 
by giving out their money to usury, are wont to snare and 
oppress the poor and needier sort.” Cartwright, the most 
famous leader of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as 
“a hainous offence against God and his Church,” and laid 
down that the offender should be excluded from the sacra- 
ments until he satisfied the congregation of his penitence.* 


216 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


The ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunc- 
tion to be content with a modest competence and to shun the 
allurements of riches. “Every Christian man is bound in 
conscience before God,” wrote Stubbes, “to provide for his 
household and family, but yet so as his immoderate care 
surpasse not the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true 
Godlynes. . . . So farre from covetousnes and from im- 
moderate care would the Lord have us, that we ought not this 
day to care for tomorrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day 
is the travail of the same.” * 

The most influential work on social ethics written in the 
first half of the seventeenth century from the Puritan stand- 
point was Ames’ De Conscientia, a manual of Christian 
conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with 
the practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle 
Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a stand- 
ard authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writ- 
ers. Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames 
spent more than twenty years in Holland, where he held a 
chair of theology at the University of Franeker, and his 
experience of social life in the country which was then the 
business capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigor of 
his social doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in 
his day was inevitable, the impossibility of distinguishing 
between interest on capital invested in business, and interest 
on capital invested in land, since men put money indifferently 
into both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden 
in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin, 
he surrounds his indulgence with qualifications; he requires 
that no interest shall be charged on loans to the needy, and 
describes as the ideal investment for Christians one in which 
the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands 
only “a fair share of the profits, according to the degree 
in which God has blessed him by whom the money is used.” 
His teaching with regard to prices is not less conservative. 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 217 


“To wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as Au- 
gustine observes), but it is a common vice.” Men must not 
sell above the maximum fixed by public authority, though 
they may sell below it, since it is fixed to protect the buyer ; 
when there is no legal maximum, they must follow the mar- 
ket price and “the judgment of prudent and good men.” 
They must not take advantage of the necessities of individual 
buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not sell them 
dearer merely because they have cost them much to get.** 
Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing were equally 
trenchant.** 

Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the * 
pulpit. It found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some 
imprint on the conduct of congregations. If D’Ewes was 
the unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive 
conscience, he was also a man of the world who played a 
not inconspicuous part in public affairs; and D’Ewes not 
only ascribed the fire which destroyed his father’s house to 
the judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly 
prescribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the 
accursed thing, provision should be made for his daughters, 
not by investing his capital at a fixed—and therefore usuri- 
ous—rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or 
of annuities.*° The classis which met at Dedham in the 
eighties of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with 
questions of ceremony, of church government, of the right 
use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys 
of sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what 
marks one might detect a witch. But it discussed also what 
provision could be made to check vagrancy; advised the 
brethren to confine their dealings to “the godliest of that 
trade” (of cloth making) ; recommended the establishment 
in the township of a scheme of universal education, that of 
children of parents too poor to meet the cost being defrayed 
from collections made in church; and urged that each well- 


218 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


to-do householder should provide in his home for two (or, 
if less able, one) of his impoverished neighbors who “walke 
christianly and honestlie in their callinges.”’ *° In the ever- 
lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins to be pun- 
ished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elaborated 
by the Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not only 
for drunkards, swearers, and blasphemers, worshippers and 
makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges, persons 
dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord’s day, or re- 
sorting to witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers, but for the 
more vulgar vices of those who fell into extortion, barratry 
and bribery.** The classis of Bury in Lancashire (quantum 
mutatus!) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided 
in 1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a scandal- 
ous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy.” *° 

It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the 
money-changers from the temple and to make straight the 
way of the Lord. “God hath honnored you in callinge 
you to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you 
should bee faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the 
grave every day; you dwell uppon the borders of eternity; 
your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble 
your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge. . . . How 
dreadfull will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate! 
What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee 
punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence 
of the Lord?” * Such, in that singular age, was the lan- 
guage in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices 
of Wiltshire to close four public-houses. Apparently they 
closed them. | 

The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective 
discipline was possible only in a theocracy; and, still elo- 
quent in speech, theocracy had abdicated in fact, even before 
the sons of Belial returned to cut down its groves and lay 
waste its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent 


eee: 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 219 


from the State Church was still not fully established, its de- 
feat was fortunate, for it was the victory of tolerance. It 


meant, however, that the discipline of the Church gave place / 
to the attempt to promote reform through the action of the | 


oe 


State, which reached its height in the Barebones Parliament. ’ 


Projects for law reform, marriage reform and financial 
reform, the reform of prisons and the relief of debtors, jos- 
tled each other on its committees ; while outside it there were 
murmurs among radicals against social and economic priv- 
ilege, which were not to be heard again till the days of the 
Chartists, and which to the conservative mind of Cromwell 
seemed to portend mere anarchy. The transition from the 
idea of a moral code enforced by the Church, which had 
been characteristic of early Calvinism, to the economic. in- 
dividualism of the later Puritan movement took place, in 
fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the Independ- 
ents. Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline and compulsory conformity, they endeavored to 
achieve the same social and ethical ends by political action. 
The change was momentous. If the English Social Demo- 
cratic movement has any single source, that source is to be 
found in the New Model Army. But the conception im- 
plied in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic eth- 
ics—the theory that every department of life falls beneath 
the same all-encompassing arch of religion—was too deeply 
rooted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even 
by the more corroding march of economic development. Ex- 
pelled from the world of fact, where it had always been a 
stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world of ideas, 
and its champions in the last half of the century labored it 
the more, precisely because they knew that it must be con- 
veyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not 
at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most 
practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter. 
How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to 


220 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


his congregation at Kidderminster, he himself has told us. 
“Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most 
desirous and had opportunity met at my house, and there 
one of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they pro- 
posed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or 
any other case of conscience, and I resolved their doubts.”’ °° 
Both in form and in matter, his Christian Directory, or a 
Summ. of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience ** is 
a remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summa The- 
ologica and.Summa Moralis in one; its method of treatment 
descends directly from that of the medieval Summe, and it 
is, perhaps, the last important English specimen of a famous 
genus. Its object, as Baxter explains in his introduction, is 
“the resolving of practical cases of conscience, and the re- 
ducing of theoretical knowledge into serious Christian prac- 
tice.” Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics, Ecclesi- 
astics, and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the 
rules of a Christian casuistry, which may be sufficiently de- 
tailed and precise to afford practical guidance to the proper 
conduct of men in the different relations of life, as lawyer, 
physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and servant, buyer 
and seller, landlord and tenant, lender and borrower, ruler 
and subject. Part of its material is derived from the treat- 
ment of similar questions by previous writers, both before 

and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of con- 
tinuing a great tradition. But it is, above all things, realis- 
tic, and its method lends plausibility to the suggestion that 
it originated in an attempt to answer practical questions put 
to its author by members of his congregation. Its aim is 
not to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal 
to the enlightened common sense of the Christian reader. 
It does not overlook, therefore, the practical facts of a world 
in which commerce is carried on by the East India Company 
in distant markets, trade is universally conducted on credit, 
the iron manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 221 


abundant supplies of capital and offering a profitable open- 
ing to the judicious investor, and the relations of landlords 
and tenants have been thrown into confusion by the fire of 
London. Nor does it ignore the moral qualities for the cul- 
tivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of 
business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial en- 
vironment of the Restoration, and its teaching is designed 
for “Rome or London, not Fools’ Paradise.” 


Baxter’s acceptance of the realities of his age makes the { 


content of his teaching the more impressive. The attempt! 
to formulate a casuistry of economic, conduct obviously im- 
plies that economic relations are to be regarded merely as one 
department of human behavior, for which each man is 
morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mech- 


anism, to which ethical judgments are irrelevant. Baxter , 


exonerates the individual by representing his actions as the 
outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists, 
is committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain ethical 
standards, and these standards are as obligatory in the 
sphere of economic transactions as in any other province 
of human activity. To the conventional objection that re- 
ligion has nothing to do with business—that “every man 
will get as much as he can have and that caveat emptor is 
the only security”’—he answers bluntly that this way of 
dealing does not hold among Christians. Whatever the 
laxity of the law, the Christian is bound to consider first the 
golden rule and the public good. Naturally, therefore, he 
is debarred from making money at the expense of other 
persons, and certain profitable avenues of commerce are 
closed to him at the outset. “It is not lawful to take up or 
keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to 
enrich you by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.”’ 

But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious ex- 
tortion practiced by the monopolist, the engrosser, the or- 


i 


declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism, which | 


222 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


ganizer of a corner or a combine. He must carry on his 
business in the spirit of one who is conducting a public serv- 
ice; he must order it for the advantage of his neighbor as 
much as, and, if his neighbor be poor, more than, for his 
own. He must not desire “to get another’s goods or labour 
for less than it is worth.” He must not secure a good price 
for his own wares “‘by extortion working upon men’s igno- 
rance, error, or necessity.”’ When prices are fixed by law, he 
must strictly observe the legal maximum; when they are not, 
he must follow the price fixed by common estimation. If 
he finds a buyer who is willing to give more, he “must not 
make too great an advantage of his convenience or desire, 
but be glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal, fair, and 
honest terms,” for “it is a false rule of them that think 
their commodity is worth as much as any one will give.” lf 
the seller foresees that in the future prices are likely to fall, 
he must not make profit out of his neighbour’s ignorance, 
but must tell him so. If he foresees that they will rise, 
he may hold his wares back, but only—a somewhat em- 
barrassing exception—if it be not “‘to the hurt of the Com- 
monwealth, as if... keeping it in be the cause of the 
dearth, and . . . bringing it forth would help to prevent 
it.” If he is buying from the poor, “charity must be exer- 
cised as well as justice’; the buyer must pay the full price 
that the goods are worth to himself, and, rather than let the 
seller suffer because he cannot stand out for his price, should 
offer him a loan or persuade some one else to do so. In no 
case may a man doctor his wares in order to get for them a 
higher price than they are really worth, and in no case may 
he conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as 
to have bought an inferior article, he “may not repair [his | 
loss by doing as [he] was done by, . . . no more than [he] 
may cut another’s purse because [his] was cut.” Rivalry 
in trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian 
must not snatch a good bargain “out of greedy covetousness, 


ag ee 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 223 


nor to the injury of the poor... nor... so as to dis- 
turb that due and civil order which should be among mod- 
erate men in trading.’ On the contrary, if ‘a covetous op- 
pressor” offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, 
“it may be a duty to offer the poor man the worth of his 
commodity and save him from the oppressor.” 

The principles which should determine the contract be- 
tween buyer and seller are applied equally to all other eco- 
nomic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a loan, 
is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes so, 
when the lender does not allow the borrower “such a pro- 


od 


portion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth — 


require, but . . . will live at ease upon his labours”; or 
when, in spite of the borrower’s misfortune, he rigorously 
exacts his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for 
a loan which charity would require to be free. Masters 
must discipline their servants for their good; but it is “an 
odious oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or la- 
bourer of his wages, yea, or to give him less than he de- 
serveth.” As the descendant of a family of yeomen, “free,” 
as he says, ‘‘from the temptations of poverty and riches,” °” 
Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of land- 
owning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under 
the general rubric of “Cases of oppression, especially of ten- 
ants,” oppression being defined as the “injuring of inferiors 
who are unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is too 
common a sort of oppression for the rich in all places to 
domineer too insolently over the poor, and force them to 
follow their wills and to serve their interest, be it right or 
wrong. . . . Especially unmerciful landlords are the com- 
mon and sore oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men 
can but get money enough to purchase all the land in a 
county, they think that they may do with their own as they 
list, and set such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that 
they are all but as their servants. . . . An oppressor is an 


224 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


Anti-Christ and an Anti-God . .. not only the agent of 
the Devil, but his image.” As in his discussion of prices, 
the gist of Baxter’s analysis of the cases of conscience which 
arise in the relations of landlord and tenant is that! no man 
may secure pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his 
neighbor. Except in unusual circumstances, a landlord 
must not let his land at the full competitive rent which it 
would fetch in the market: “Ordinarily the common sort of 
tenants in England should have so much abated of the full- 
est worth that they may comfortably live on it, and follow 
their labours with cheerfulness of mind and liberty to serve 
God in their families, and to mind the matters of their sal- 
vation, and not to be necessitated to such toil and care and 
pinching want as shall make them liker slaves than free 
men.” He must not improve (i.e., enclose) his land without 
considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants 
without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause 
depopulation; nor must a newcomer take a holding over the 
sitting tenant’s head by offering “a greater rent than he can 
give or than the landlord hath just cause to require of him.”’ 
The Christian, in short, while eschewing “causeless, perplex- 
ing, melancholy scruples, which would stop a man in the 
course of his duty,’ must so manage his business as to “‘avoid 
sin rather than loss,” and seek first to keep his conscience in 
peace. 


The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all . 


this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic 
and political revolutions of the past two centuries, how 
small, after all, the change in the presentation of the social 
ethics of the Christian faith! A few months after the ap- 
pearance of the Christian Directory, the Stop of the Ex- 
chequer tore a hole in the already intricate web of London 
finance, and sent a shiver through the money-markets of 
Europe. But Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, dis- 
courses of equity in bargaining, of just prices, of reason- 


= 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 225 


able rents, of the sin of usury, in the same tone, if not with 
quite the same conclusions, as a medieval Schoolman, and he 
differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, 
hardly more than St. Antonino himself had differed from 
Aquinas. Seven years later Bunyan published The Life 
and Death of Mr. Badman. Among the vices which it pil- 
loried were the sin of extortion, “most commonly commit- 
ted by men of trade, who without all conscience, when they 
have an advantage, will make a prey of their neighbour,” 
the covetousness of “hucksters, that buy up the poor man’s 
victual wholesale and sell it to him again for unreasonable 
gains,’ the avarice of usurers, who watch till “the poor fall 
into their mouths,” and “of those vile wretches called pawn- 
brokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who 
are by necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will 
make by one trick or another the interest of what they so 
lend amount to thirty and forty,-yea, sometimes fifty pounds 
by the year.” As Christian and Christiana watched Mr. 
Badman thus bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, 
before they took staff and scrip for their journey to a more 
distant City, they remembered that the Lord himself will 
plead the cause of the afflicted against them that oppress 
them, and reflected, taught by the dealings of Ephron the son 
of Zohar, and of David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there 
is a “‘wickedness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too 
cheap.” °* Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the 
same four centuries before in his racy sermons in Germany. 
The emergence of the idea that “business is business,” and 
that the world of commercial transactions is a closed com- 
partment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often 
supposed, did not win so painless a triumph as is some- 
times suggested. Puritan as well as Catholic accepted with- 
out demur the view which set all human interests and ac- 
tivities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well 


226 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


as Catholics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a 
Christian casuistry of economic conduct. 

They essayed it. But they succeeded even less than the 
Popes and Doctors whose teaching, not always unwittingly, 
they repeated: And their failure had its roots, not merely 
in the obstacles offered by the ever more recalcitrant oppo- 
sition of a commercial environment, but, like all failures 
which are significant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Vir- 
tues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most com- 
plete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more 
efficient, or more congenial, and it is not only tares which 
choke the ground where the gcod seed is sown. The funda- 
mental question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith 
enjoins, but what type of character it esteems and culti- 
vates. To the scheme of Christian ethics which offered ad- 
monitions against the numberless disguises assumed by the 
sin which sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puri- 
tan character offered, not direct opposition, but a polished 
surface on which these ghostly admonitions could find no - 
enduring foothold. The rules of Christian morality elab- 
orated by Baxter were subtle and sincere. But they were 
like seeds carried by birds from a distant and fertile plain, 
and dropped upon a glacier. They were at once embalmed 
and sterilized in a river of ice. 

“The capitalist spirit” is as old as history, and was not, 
as has sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism, 
But it found in certain aspects of later Puritanism a tonic 
which braced its energies and fortified its already vigorous 
temper. At first sight, no contrast could be more violent - 
than that between the iron collectivism, the almost military 
discipline, the remorseless and violent rigors practiced in 
Calvin’s Geneva, and preached elsewhere, if in a milder 
form, by his disciples, and the impatient rejection of all tra- 
ditional restrictions on economic enterprise which was the 
temper of the English business world after the Civil War. 


A GODLY DISCIPLINE 227 


In reality, the same ingredients were present throughout, but 
they were mixed in changing proportions, and exposed to 
different temperatures at different times. Like traits of in- 
dividual character which are suppressed till the approach of 
maturity releases them, the tendencies in Puritanism, which 
were to make it later a potent ally of the movement against 
the control of economic relations in the name either of social 
morality or of the public interest, did not reveal themselves 
till political and economic changes had prepared a congenial 
environment for their growth. Nor, once those conditions 
were created, was it only England which witnessed the trans- 
formation. In all countries alike, in Holland, in America, 
in Scotland, in Geneva itself, the social theory of Calvinism 
went through the same process of development. “Tt had be- 
gun by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. 
It ended by being the vehicle of an almost Utilitarian in- 
dividualism.,, While social reformers in the sixteenth cen- 
tury could praise Calvin for his economic rigor, their suc- 
cessors in Restoration England, if of one persuasion, de- 
nounced him as the parent of economic license, if of another, 
applauded Calvinist communities for their commercial enter- 
prise and for their freedom from antiquated prejudices on 
the subject of economic morality. So little do those who 
shoot the arrows of the spirit know where they will light. 


- 


4 III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 


“One beam in a dark place,’’ wrote one who knew the 
travail of the spirit, “hath exceeding much refreshment in 
it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart 
as mine.” °* While the revelation of God to the individual 
soul is the center of all religion, the essence of Puritan the- 
ology was that it made it, not only the center, but the whole © 
circumference and substance, dismissing as dross and vanity 
all else but this secret and solitary communion. Grace alone 


220 Wek THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


can save, and this grace is the direct gift of God, unmediated 
by any earthly institution. The elect cannot by any act of 
their own evoke it; but they can prepare their hearts to 
receive it, and cherish it when received. They will prepare 
them best, if they empty them of all that may disturb the 
intentness of their lonely vigil. Like an engineer, who, to 
canalize the rush of the oncoming tide, dams all channels 
save that through which it is to pour, like a painter who 
makes light visible by plunging all that is not light in gloom, 
the Puritan attunes his heart to the voice from Heaven by 
an immense effort of concentration and abnegation. To win 
all, he renounces all. When earthly props have been cast 
down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God. Infin- 
ity is attained by a process of subtraction. 

To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, 
not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire 
world of human relations, the whole fabric of social insti- 
tutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and 
their greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal them- 
selves in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit 
burns brightly on the hearth; but through the windows of 
his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a 
landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees 
is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow- 
clad leagues towards the grave—a wilderness to be subdued 
with aching limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he 
must take his way, alone. No aid can avail him: no preacher, 
for only the elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of 
God; no Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates 
belong; no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to in- 
crease the glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourish- 
ment to man; hardly God himself, for Christ died for the 
elect, and it may well be that the majesty of the Creator is 
revealed by the eternal damnation of all but a remnant of 
the created.”® | 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 229 


His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suf- 
fers in spirit the perils which the first settlers in America 
endured in body, the sea behind, the untamed desert in 
front, a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand. Where 
Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, 
hovering like a consecration over the gross world of sense, 
and touching its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam 
of a divine, yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a 
lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had 
seen society as a mystical body, compact of members vary- 
ing in order and degree, but dignified by participation in the 
common life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis be- 
tween the spirit which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or 
hostile world. Where they had reverenced the decent order 
whereby past was knit to present, and man to man, and 
man to God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festi- 
val and fast, in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, 
he turned with horror from the filthy rags of human right- 
eousness. Where they, in short, had found comfort in a 
sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his 
soul. 


We receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live. 


Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he 
made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of 
his contempt. 

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, 
unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to 
find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an em- 
barrassing resemblance to their own. The moral self-suffi- 
ciency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his 
sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny 
hangs on a private transaction between himself and his 
Maker, what room is left for human intervention? A serv- 


230 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


ant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a 
Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved 
less by compassion for his erring brethren than by impa- 
tient indignation at the blindness of vessels of wrath who 
“sinned their mercies.”’ A spiritual aristocrat, who sacri- 
ficed fraternity to liberty, he drew from his idealization of 
personal responsibility a theory of individual rights, which, 
secularized and generalized, was to be among the most po- 
tent explosives that the world has known. He drew from it 
also a scale of ethical values, in which the traditional scheme 
of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed, and which, 
since he was above all things practical, he carried as a dy- 
namic into the routine of business and political life. 

For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to 
attain the free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift 
has been accorded, what is rejected as a means is resumed 
as a consequence, and the Puritan flings himself into prac- 
tical activities with the demonic energy of one who, all 
doubts allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen 
vessel. Once engaged in affairs, he brings to them both 
the qualities and limitations of his creed in all their re- 
morseless logic. Called by God to labor in his vineyard, 
he has within himself a principle at once of energy and of 
order, which makes him irresistible both in war and in the 
struggles of commerce. Convinced that character is all and 
circumstances nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who 
fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, 
but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an 
object of suspicion—though like other gifts they may be 
abused—but the blessing which rewards the triumph of 
energy and will. Tempered by self-examination, self-dis- . 
cipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic, whose vic- 
tories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the 
counting-house, and in the market. 

This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 231 


and emphasis, found its social organ in those middle and 
commercial classes who were the citadel of the Puritan 
spirit, and whom, “ennobled by their own industry and vir- 
tue,’ °* Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress 
and enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think of Eng- 
land as par excellence the pioneer of economic progress, 
that we are apt to forget how recently that role has been 
assumed. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, 
in the sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the 
Spanish Empire, in the seventeenth to the United Provinces 
and, above all, to the Dutch. 

The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely 
medieval in its economic organization and social outlook, 
more interested in maintaining customary standards of con- 
sumption than in accumulating capital for future produc- 
tion, with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic 
virtues, a peasantry farming for subsistence amid the or- 
ganized confusion of the open-field village, and a small, if 
growing, body of jealously conservative craftsmen. In such 
a society Puritanism worked like the yeast which sets the 
whole mass fermenting. It went through its slack and 
loosely knit texture like a troop of Cromwell’s Ironsides 
through the disorderly cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in 
Ireland, the elements were so alien that assimilation was out 
of the question, the result was a wound that festered for 
three centuries. In England the effect was that at once of 


an irritant and of a tonic. Puritanism had its own stand- | 


ards of social conduct, derived partly from the obvious in- 
terests of the commercial classes, partly from its concep- 
tion of the nature of God and the destiny of man. These 
standards were in sharp antithesis, both to the considerable 
surviving elements of feudalism in English society, and to 
the policy of the authoritarian State, with its ideal of an 
ordered and graded society, whose different members were 
to be maintained in their traditional status by the pressure 


232 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


and protection of a paternal monarchy. Sapping the former 
by its influence and overthrowing the latter by direct at- 
tack, Puritanism became a potent force in preparing the way 
for the commercial civilization which finally triumphed at 
the Revolution. 

The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at 
upsetting the government of the Church, went hand in hand 
with an economic radicalism, which resented the restraints 
on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion 
or of social policy, was being made by the stricter school 
of religious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth.” 
Seventeenth-century writers repeated the charge that the 
Puritan conscience lost its delicacy where matters of busi- 
ness were concerned, and some of them were sufficiently 
struck by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explana- 
tion of it. The example on which they usually seized—the 
symbol of a supposed general disposition to laxity—was 
the indulgence shown by Puritan divines in the particular 
matter of moderate interest. It was the effect, so the pic- 
turesque story ran,’* of the Marian persecution. The refu- 
gees who fled to the Continent could not start business in 
a foreign country. If, driven by necessity, they invested 
their capital and lived on the proceeds, who could quarrel 
with so venial a lapse in so good a cause? Subsequent writ- 
ers embellished the picture. The redistribution of property 
at the time of the Dissolution, and the expansion of trade 
in the middle of the century, had led, one of them argued, 
to a great increase in the volume of credit transactions. 
The opprobrium which attached to loans at interest—“a sly 
and forbid practice’—not only among Romanists and An- 
glicans, but among honest Puritans, played into the hands 
of the less scrupulous members of “the faction.” Disap- 
pointed in politics, they took to money-lending, and, with- 
out venturing to justify ustiry in theory, defended it in prac- 
tice. “Without the scandal of a recantation, they contrived 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 233 


an expedient, by maintaining that, though usury for the 
name were stark naught, yet for widows, orphans and other 
impotents (therein principally comprising the saints under 
persecution) it was very tolerable, because profitable, and in 
a manner necessary.” Naturally, Calvin’s doctrine as to the 
legitimacy of moderate interest was hailed by these hypo- 
crites with a shout of glee. “It took with the brethren like 
polygamy with the Turks, recommended by the example of 
divers zealous ministers, who themselves desired to pass for 
orphans of the first rank.” °° Nor was it only as the apolo- 
gist of moderate interest that Puritanism was alleged to re- 
veal the cloven hoof. Puritans themselves complained of a 
mercilessness in driving hard bargains, and of a harshness 
to the poor, which contrasted unfavorably with the practice 
of followers of the unreformed religion. ‘The Papists,” 
wrote a Puritan in 1653, “may rise up against many of this 
generation. It is a sad thing that they should be more for- 
ward upon a bad principle than a Christian upon a good 
Ore oi = 

Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pamph- 
leteer. The real story was less dramatic, but more signifi- 
cant. From the very beginning, Calvinism had comprised 
two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which 
contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given 
a whole-hearted imprimatur to the life of business enter- 
prise, which most earlier moralists had regarded with sus- 
picion, and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an in- + 
 quisitorial discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was 
the creed of a small and homogeneous city, the second as- 
pect had predominated; in the many-sided life of England, 
where there were numerous conflicting interests to balance 
it, and where it was long politically weak, the first. Then, 
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had 
come the wave of commercial and financial expansion— 
companies, colonies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism, in 


234 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


mining, capitalism in finance—on the crest of which the 
English commercial classes, in Calvin’s day still held in 
leading-strings by conservative statesmen, had climbed to a 
position of dignity and affluence. 

Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, 
these two elements flew apart. The collectivist, half-com- 
munistic aspect, which had never been acclimatized in Eng- 
land, quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more, 
and for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant 
and landowner, in the popular agitation under the Com- 
monwealth. The individualism congenial to the world of 
business became the distinctive characteristic of a Puritan- 
ism which had arrived, and which, in becoming a political 
force, was at once secularized and committed to a career 
of compromise. Its note was not the attempt to establish 
on earth a “Kingdom of Christ,’ but an ideal of personal 
character and conduct, to be realized by the punctual dis- 
charge both of public and private duties. Its theory had 
been discipline; its practical result was liberty. 

Given the social and political conditions of England, the 


- transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of 


Presbyterianism with the stratified arrangement of English 
society had been remarked by Hooker.** If the City Fath- 
ers of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the sev- 
enteenth century the religious collectivism of Calvin’s 
régime, it was not to be expected that the landowners and 
bourgeoisie of an aristocratic and increasingly commercial 
nation, however much Calvinist theology might appeal to 
them, would view with favor the social doctrines implied in 
Calvinist discipline. In the reign of the first two Stuarts, 
both economic interests and political theory pulled them 
hard in the opposite direction. “Merchants’ doings,” the 
man of business in Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury had 
observed, “must not thus be overthwarted by preachers and 
others that cannot skill of their dealings.” ° Behind the 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 235 


elaborate facade of Tudor State control, which has attracted 
the attention of historians, an individualist movement had 
been steadily developing, which found expression in opposi- 
tion to the traditional policy of stereotyping economic rela- 
tions by checking enclosure, controlling food supplies and 
prices, interfering with the money-market, and regulating 
the conditions of the wage contract and of apprenticeship. 
In the first forty years of the seventeenth century, on grounds 
both of expediency and of principle, the commercial and 
propertied classes were becoming increasingly restive under 
the whole system, at once ambitious and inefficient, of eco- 
nomic paternalism. It was in the same sections of the com- 
munity that both religious and economic dissatisfaction 
were most acute. Puritanism, with its idealization of the 
spiritual energies which found expression in the activities of 
business and industry, drew the isolated rivulets of disc6n- 
tent together, and swept them forward with the dignity and 
momentum of a religious and a social philosophy. 

For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as 
to theology and church government, but as the champion of 
interests and opinions embracing every side of the life of 
society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with 
the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ide- 
ologies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were 


not disentangled; they presented themselves, both to sup- ,- 


porters and opponents, as different facets of a single scheme. 
“All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud 
encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility 
and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest 
habit or conversation, or anything good—all these were Pu- 
ritans.” ** The clash was not one of theories —a system- 
atic and theoretical individualism did not develop till after 
the Restoration—but of contradictory economic interests and 
incompatible conceptions of social expediency. 

The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Government 


236 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


of Charles I bore some resemblance to the system of which 
a more uncompromising version was developed between 
1661 and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was one which 
favored an artificial and State-promoted capitalism—a cap- 
italism resting on the grant of privileges and concessions to 
company promoters who would pay for them, and accom- 
panied by an elaborate system of State control, which again, 
if partly inspired by a genuine solicitude for the public in- 
terest, was too often smeared with an odious trail of finance. 
It found its characteristic expression in the grant of pat- 
ents, in the revival of the royal monopoly of exchange busi- 
ness, against which the City had fought under Elizabeth, in 
attempts to enforce by administrative action compliance with 
the elaborate and impracticable code controlling the textile 
trades and to put down speculation in foodstuffs, and in 
raids on enclosing landlords, on employers who paid in 
truck or evaded the rates fixed by assessment, and on jus- 
tices who were negligent in the administration of the Poor 
Laws. Such measures were combined with occasional 
plunges into even more grandiose schemes for the estab- 
lishment of county granaries, for taking certain industries 
into the hands of the Crown, and even for the virtual na- 
tionalization of the cloth manufacture. ™ 

“The very genius of that nation of people,’ wrote Straf- 
ford to Laud of the Puritans, “leads them always to oppose, 
as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority or- 
dains for them.” * Against this whole attempt to convert 
economic activity into an instrument of profit for the Goy- 
ernment and its hangers-on—against, no less, the spasmodic 
attempts of the State to protect peasants against landlords, 
craftsmen against merchants, and consumers against middle- 
men—the interests which it thwarted and curbed revolted 
with increasing pertinacity. Questions of taxation, on 
which attention has usually been concentrated, were in real- 
ity merely one element in a quarrel which had its deeper 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 237 


cause in the collision of incompatible social philosophies. 
The Puritan tradesman had seen his business ruined by a 
monopoly granted to a needy courtier, and cursed Laud 
and his Popish soap. The Puritan goldsmith or financier 
had found his trade as a bullion-broker hampered by the 
reestablishment of the ancient office of Royal Exchanger, 
and secured a resolution from the House of Commons, de- 
claring that the patent vesting it in Lord Holland and the 
proclamation forbidding the exchanging of gold and silver 
by unauthorized persons were a grievance. The Puritan 
money-lender had been punished by the Court of High 
Commission, and railed at the interference of bishops in 
temporal affairs. The Puritan clothier, who had suffered 
many things at the hands of interfering busy-bodies des- 
patched from Whitehall to teach him his business, averted 
discreet eyes when the Wiltshire workmen threw a more 
than usually obnoxious Royal Commissioner into the Avon, 
and, when the Civil War came, rallied to the Parliament. 
The Puritan country gentleman had been harried by De- 
population Commissions, and took his revenge with the 
meeting of the Long Parliament. The Puritan merchant 
had seen the Crown both squeeze money out of his company, 
and threaten its monopoly by encouraging courtly inter- 
lopers to infringe its charter. The Puritan member of Par- 
liament had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas 
as to commercial policy which were not those of the Gov- 
ernment. Confident in their own energy and acumen, proud 
of their success, and regarding with profound distrust the 
interference both of Church and of State with matters of 
business and property rights, the commercial classes, in 
spite of their attachment to a militant mercantilism in mat- 
ters of trade, were, even before the Civil War, more than 
half converted to the administrative nihilism which was to 
be the rule of social policy in the century following it. Their 
demand was the one which is usual in such circumstances. 


238 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


It was that business affairs should be left to be settled by 
business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an anti- 
quated morality or by misconceived arguments of public 
policy.*° 

The separation of economic from ethical interests, which 
was the note of all this movement, was in sharp opposition 
to religious tradition, and it did not establish itself without 
a struggle. Even in the very capital of European commerce 
and finance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by 
the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer de- 
grees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamphleteer- 
ing, in which the theological faculty of the University of 
Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity, that the 
States of Holland and West Friesland closed the agitation 
by declaring that the Church had no concern with questions 
of banking.®’ In the French Calvinist Churches, the decline 
of discipline had caused lamentations a generation earlier.® 
In America, the theocracy of Massachusetts, merciless alike 
to religious liberty and to economic license, was about to 
be undermined by the rise of new States like Rhode Island 
and Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and utilita- 
rian temper was destined to find its greatest representative 
in the golden common sense of Benjamin Franklin.” ‘The 
sin of our too great fondness for trade, to the neglecting of 
our more valuable interests,’ wrote a Scottish divine in 
1709, when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant out- 
burst of commercial enterprise, “I humbly think will be 
written upon our judgment. ... I am sure the Lord is 
remarkably frowning upon our trade . . . since it was put 
in the room of religion.” 7° 

In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively 
economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan 
writers and divines vigorous protests against usurious inter- 
est, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by 
landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 239 


too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by 
works, but by faith. Usury, “in time of Popery an odious 
thing,’ ” had become a scandal. Professors, by their cov- 
etousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to 
blaspheme.** The exactions of the forestaller and regrater 
were never so monstrous or so immune from interference. 
The hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities 
of the poor so neglected. ‘The poor able to work are suf- 
fered to beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently 
provided for, but almost starved with the allowance of 32d. 
and 4d. a piece a week. . . . These are the last times in- 
deed. Men generally are all for themselves. And some 
would set up such, having a form of religion, without the 
power of it.” * 

These utterances came, however, from that part of the 
Puritan mind which looked backward. That which looked 
forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic 
enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, 
and went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had 
been a qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared 
in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the 
life of the trader, as the service of God and the training- 
ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic 
- motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers 
as of medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases 
added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of eco- 
nomic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the 
duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long 
estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokes- 
men pointed out, it is true, the peril to the soul involved in a 
single-minded concentration on economic interests. The 
enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits some- 
times associated with them, and its warnings against an ex- 
cessive preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more 
and more the air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching the 


240 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


main tendency and emphasis of which were little affected by 
these incidental qualifications. It insisted, in short, that 
money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a 
danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to 
be, carried on for the greater glory of God. 


The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf ~ 


sprang from the very heart of Puritan theology. It was 
that expressed in the characteristic and oft-used phrase, “a 
Calling.” “* The rational order of the universe is the work 


of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labor 


for God’s glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a tem-_ 


poral calling. It is the first duty of the Christian to know 
and believe in God; it is by faith that he will be saved. But 
faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of 
Prating Row, whose “religion is to make a noise.” ‘The 


only genuine faith is the faith which produces works. “At 


the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their 
fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were 
you doers, or talkers only?’ The second duty of the 
Christian is to labor in the affairs of practical life, and this 
second duty is subordinate only to the first. ‘‘God,” wrote 
a Puritan divine, “doth call every man and woman... to 
serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both 
for their own and the common good. . . . The Great Goy- 
ernour of the world hath appointed to every man his proper 
post and province, and let him be never so active out of his 
sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own 
vineyard and mind his own business.”’ 7° 


From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as — 
imposed by the divine will, it follows that, not withdrawal — 


from the world, but the conscientious discharge of the du- 


ties of business, is among the loftiest of religious and moral_ 


virtues. “The begging friars and such monks as live only 
to themselves and to their formal devotion, but do employ 
themselves in no one thing to further their own subsistence 


DRL MPHAOr LHE-ECONOMIC VIRTUES” t241 


or the good of mankind ... yet have the confidence to 
boast of this their course as a state of perfection; which in 
very deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poor- 
est cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none.” 
The idea was not a new one. Luther had advanced it as 
a weapon against monasticism, But for Luther, with his 
patriarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling means 
normally that state of life in which the individual has been 
set by Heaven, and against which it is impiety to rebel. On 
the lips of Puritan divines, it is not an invitation to resigna- 
tion, but the bugle-call which summons the elect to the long 
battle which will end only with their death. “The world is 
all before them.” They are to hammer out their salvation, 
not merely 1m vocatione, but per vocationem. ‘The calling is 
not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenu- 
ous and exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under 
the guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by each man 
for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibili- 
ties. “God hath given to man reason for this use, that he 
should first consider, then choose, then put in execution; 
and it is a preposterous and brutish thing to fix or fall upon 
any weighty business, such as a calling or condition of life, 
without a careful pondering it in the balance of sound rea- 
sony al 

Laborare est orare. By the Puritan moralist the ancient 
maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The 
labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed 
by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself 
a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that de- 
manded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by 
the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in 
the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an 
economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have 
been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the 
soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty 


242 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


long after it has ceased to be a material necessity. Work 
thus conceived stands at the very opposite pole from “good 
works,’ as they were understood, or misunderstood, by 
Protestants. They, it was thought, had been a series of 
single transactions, performed as compensation for particu- 
lar sins, or out of anxiety to acquire merit. What is re- 
quired of the Puritan is not individual meritorious acts, but 
a holy life—a system in which every element is grouped 
round a central idea, the service of God, from which all dis- 
turbing irrelevances have been pruned, and to which all mi- 
nor interests are subordinated. 

His conception of that life was expressed in the words, 
“Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful 
callings, when you are not exercised in the more immediate 
service of God.” ” In order to deepen his spiritual life, the 
Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He “is blind in 
no man’s cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines 
himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his 
fingers in needless fires. . . . He sees the falseness of it 
[the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, 
others so far as not to be damaged by their disappoint- 
ment.” *° There must be no idle leisure: “those that are 
prodigal of their time despise their own souls.” ** Religion 
must be active, not merely contemplative. Contemplation 
is, indeed, a kind of self-indulgence. “To neglect this [i.e., 
bodily employment and mental labor] and say, ‘I will pray 
and meditate,’ is as if your servant should refuse your 
greatest work, and tye himself to some lesser, easie part. 
. . . God hath commanded you some way or other to labour 
for your daily bread.” * The rich are no more excused 
from work than the poor, though they may rightly use their 
riches to select some occupation specially serviceable to oth- 
ers. Covetousness is a danger to the soul, but it is not so 
grave a danger as sloth. “The standing pool is prone to pu- 
trefaction: and it were better to beat down the body and ta 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 243 


keep it in subjection by a laborious calling, than through lux- 
ury to become a cast-away.” ** So far from poverty being 
meritorious, it is a duty to choose the more profitable occu- 
pation. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully 
get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul 
or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less 
gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and 
you refuse to be God’s steward.” Luxury, unrestrained 
pleasure, personal extravagance, can have no place in a 
Christian’s conduct, for “every penny which is laid out... 
must be done as by God’s own appointment.’”’ Even exces- 
sive devotion to friends and relations is to be avoided. “It 
is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational crea- 
ture, to love any one farther than reason will allow us... . 
It very often taketh up men’s minds so as to hinder their 
love to God.” ** The Christian life, in short, must be sys- 
tematic and organized, the work of an iron will and a cool in- 
telligence. Those who have read Mill’s account of his father 
must have been struck by the extent to which Utilitarianism 
was not merely a political doctrine, but a moral attitude. 
Some of the links in the Utilitarian coat of mail were forged, 
it may be suggested, by the Puritan divines of the seven- 
teenth century. 

The practical application of these generalities to business 
is set out in the numerous works composed to expound the 
rules of Christian conduct in the varied relations of life. If _ 
one may judge by their titlkes—Navigation Spiritualized, 
Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver *°—there 
must have been a considerable demand for books conducive 
to professional edification. A characteristic specimen is 
The Tradesman’s Calling,*° by Richard Steele. The au- 
thor, after being deprived of a country living under the Act 
of Uniformity, spent his declining years as minister of a 
congregation at Armourers Hall in London, and may be 
presumed to have understood the spiritual requirements of 


244. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


the City in his day, when the heroic age of Puritanism was 
almost over and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue. No 
one who was writing a treatise on economic ethics today 
would address himself primarily to the independent shop- 
keeper, as the figure niost representative of the business 
community, and Steele’s book throws a flood of light on 
the problems and outlook of the bourgeoisie, in an age be- 
fore the center of economic gravity had shifted from the 
substantial tradesman to the exporting merchant, the indus- 
trial capitalist and the financier. 

Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier 
authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, how- 
ever, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of 
quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman 
ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or three 
callings merely to increase his riches,” or oppress the poor; 
nor should he seek more than “a reasonable proportion of 
gain,’ or “lie on the catch to make [his] markets of others’ 
straits.”’ But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various 
objective standards of a reasonable profit—cost of produc- 
tion, standard of life, customary prices—which had been 
suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual 
must judge for himself. “Here, as in many other cases, an 
upright conscience must be the clerk of the market.” 

Tn reality, however, the characteristic of The Trades- 
man’s Calling, as of the age in which it was written, is not 
the relics of medieval doctrine which linger embalmed in its 
guileless pages, but the robust common sense, which carries 
the author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial, 
if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a comfort- 
able one—that there is no necessary conflict between reli- 
gion and business. “Prudence and Piety were always very 
good friends. ... You may gain enough of both worlds 
if you would mind each in its place.”’. His object is to show a 
how that agreeable result may be produced by dedicating | 


ae 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 245 


business—with due reservations—to the service of God, and 
he has naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of eco- 
nomic conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that trade 
itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman’s first duty is to 
get a full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to 
improve it. “He that hath lent you talents hath also said, 
‘Occupy till I come!’ Your strength is a talent, your parts 
are talents, and so is your time. How is it that ye stand all 


the day idle? ... Your trade is your proper province. 
. . . Your own vineyard you should keep. . . . Your fan- 
cies, your understandings, your memories . . . are all to be 


laid out therein.” So far from their being an inevitable col- 
lision between the requirements of business and the claims 
of religion, they walk hand in hand. By a fortunate dis- 
pensation, the virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence, 
moderation, sobriety, thrift—are the very qualities most con- 
ducive to commercial success. The foundation of all is 
prudence; and prudence is merely another name for the 
“godly wisdom [which] comes in and puts due bounds” to 
his expenses, “‘and teaches the tradesman to live rather some- 
what below than at all above his income.” Industry comes 
next, and industry is at once expedient and meritorious. It 
will keep the tradesman from “frequent and needless fre- 
quenting of taverns,” and pin him to his shop, “where you 
may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of 
God.” 

If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company, 
speculation, gambling, politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in 
religion—it is these things which are the ruin of tradesmen. 
Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the con- 
trary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy 
ejaculations.” What is deprecated is merely the unbusiness- 
like habit of “neglecting a man’s necessary affairs upon pre- 
tence of religious worship.” But these faults, common and 
uncommon alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the 


246 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


sineere Christian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress 
his neighbor, but need not fly to the other extreme, be 
righteous overmuch, or refuse to “take the advantage which 
the Providence of God puts into his hands.” By a kind of 
happy, preéstablished harmony, such as a later age discov- 
ered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the 
individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of 
spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has labored 
faithfully in his vocation, and that ‘God has blessed his 
trade.” “Nothing will pass in any man’s account except it 
be done in the way of his calling. . . . Next to the saving 
his soul, [the tradesman’s] care and business is to serve God 
in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.” 

When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be 
a duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, 
the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county 
of Coveting in the north.’ The inference was illogical, but 
how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so in- 
discreet as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard 
Street a sermon against usury on the text, ‘““The Pharisees 
who were covetous heard all these things and they derided 
Christ,” his career in London was brought to an abrupt 
conclusion.** 

The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely pene- 
trated by moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of theory 
on practice would be paradoxical. But, if the circumstances 
which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall be profit- 
able are economic, those which decide that they shall be 
the object of general approval are primarily moral and in- 
tellectual. For conventions to be adopted with whole- 
hearted enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but ap- 
plauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admiration 
of its philosophers, the second condition must be present as 
well as the first. The insistence among men of pecuniary 
motives, the strength of economic egotism, the appetite for 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 247 


gain—these are the commonplaces of every age and need no 
emphasis. What is significant is the change of standards 
which converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue. 
After all, it appears, a man can serve two masters, for—so 
happily is the world disposed—he may be paid by one, while 
he works for the other. Between the old-fashioned denun- 
ciation of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned 
applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the 
argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge 
of a duty imposed by God. 

In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse 
of Trade, by N. B., M.D.*° Notable for its enlightened dis- 
cussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it 
is a good specimen of an indifferent genus. But its author- 
ship was more significant than its argument. For N. B. 
was Dr. Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, cur- 
rency expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land- 
banks, was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the 
parody of whose alluring surname a cynical posterity re- 
corded its verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the 
Saints over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Pu- 
ritan rigor to Restoration license is the most familiar of 
platitudes. The reaction to a mundane materialism was 
more gradual, more general, and ultimately of greater sig- 
nificance. The profligacy of the courtier had its decorous 
counterpart in the economic orgies of the tradesman and the 
merchant. Votaries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exact- 
ing and more profitable divinity, they celebrated their relief 
at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging with 
redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing 
money. 

The transition from the anabaptist to the company pro- 
moter was less abrupt than might at first sight be supposed. 
It had been prepared, however unintentionally, by Puritan 
moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring 


248 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury 
and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation 
and self-discipline and rational calculation, they had created 
an ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical 
principle the efficiency which economic theorists were 
preaching as a specific for social disorders. It was as capti- 
vating as it was novel. To countless generations of reli- 
gious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social 
ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to 
Timothy: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith 
content. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” 
Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a 
new standard was raised within the citadel by its own de- 
fenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading 
host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. 
Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless in- 
crease and expansion, became the goal of the Christian’s ef- 
forts. Not consumption, on which the eyes of earlier sages 
had been turned, but production, became the pivot of his 
argument. Not an easy-going and open-handed charity, 
but a systematic and methodical accumulation, won the meed 
of praise that belongs to the good and faithful servant. 
The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all hu- 
man relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness 
which cannot rest while there are competitors to be con- 
quered or profits to be won, the love of social power and 
hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had 
evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denuncia-_ 
tions of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters 
of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages | 
had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. , 
They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world ex-_ 
ists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its con- 
queror deserves the name of Christian. For such a phi- 
losophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 249 


no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of 
his own soul as well. 

The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously 
sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most 
earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of 
moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and 
the main aim of public policy had been the stability of tra- 
ditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the iden- 
tification of labor and enterprise with the service of God. 
The magnificent energy which changed in a century the 
face of material civilization was to draw nourishment from 
that temper. The worship of production and ever greater 
production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his 
unhappy servants—was to be hallowed by the precepts of 
the same compelling creed. 

Social development moves with a logic whose inferences 
are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications 
had not yet dawned. The version of Christian ethics ex- 
pounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still 
only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a flow- 
ing tide. It had an unconscious ally in the pre-occupation 
with economic interests which found expression in the en- 
thusiasm of business. politicians for a commercial Macht- 
polittk. The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland 
“for the fairest mistress in the world—trade,” °° was not 
two years old when it made its own essay in economic i1m- 
perialism. “A bare-faced war” for commerce, got up by 
the Royal African Company, was Clarendon’s verdict ** on 
the Dutch war of 1665-7. Five years later, Shaftesbury 
hounded the City against Holland with the cry of Delendu 
est Carthago. The war finance of the Protectorate had 
made it necessary for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, 
as well as native, capitalists, and the impecunious Gcvern- 
ment of the Restoration was in the hands of those syndi- 
cates of goldsmiths whose rapacity the Chancellor, a sur- 


250 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


vivor from the age before the deluge, when aristocrats still 
despised the upstart plutocracy, found not a little disgust- 
ing.”? 

The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified 
no less the mood which glorified the economic virtues. Eco- 
nomic science developed in England, not, as in Germany, 
as the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in France, 
through the speculations of philosophers and men of letters, 
but as the interpreter of the practical interests of the City. 
With the exception of Petty and Locke, its most eminent 
practitioners were business men, and the questions which 
excited them were those, neither of production nor of social 
organization, but of commerce and finance—the balance of 
trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The rise of Po- 
litical Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly influ- 
enced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by the 
progress of natural science, stamped their spontaneous and 
doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical or- 
thodoxy. “Knowledge,” wrote the author of the preface to 
a work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new 
science, “in great measure is become mechanical.” °* The 
exact analysis of natural conditions, the calculations of 
forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the opera- 
tion of simple, constant and measurable forces, was the 
natural bias of an age interested primarily in mathematics 
and physics. Its object was “to express itself in terms of 


number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, . 


and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations 
in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, 
opinions, appetites and passions of particular men to the con- 
sideration of others.”’ ** 

In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had 
occupied so large a place in the earlier treatment of social 
and economic subjects, seemed the voice of an antiquated 
superstition. Moreover, the main economic dogma of the 


< 


f 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 251 


mercantilist had an affinity with the main ethical dogma of 
the Puritan} which was the more striking because the coin- 
cidence was undesigned. ‘To the former, production, not 
consumption, was the pivot of the economic system, and, by 
what seems to the modern reader a curious perversion, con- 
sumption is applauded only because it offers a new market 
for productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal virtues 
are precisely those which find in the strenuous toils of in- 
dustry and commerce their most natural expression. The 
typical qualities of the successful business life, in the days 
before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and 
earnestness of labor, concentration, system and method, the 
initiative which broke with routine and the foresight which 
postponed the present to the future. Advice like that of the 
Reverend Mr. Steele to his City congregation was admirably 
calculated to give these arduous excellences a heightened 
status and justification. The lean goddess, Abstinence. 
whom Mr. Keynes, in a passage of brilliant indiscretion, 
has revealed as the tutelary divinity of Victorian England, 
was inducted to the austere splendors of her ascetic shrine 
by the pious hands of Puritan moralists. 

Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legis- 
lation from a direct participation in public affairs, Dissent- 
ers of means and social position threw themselves into the 
alternative career offered by commerce and finance, and did 
so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their 
choice. If they conformed, the character given them by 
their critics—‘‘opinionating, relying much upon their own 
judgment ... ungrateful, as not holding themselves be- 
holden to any man .. . proud, as thinking themselves the 
only favorites of God, and the only wise or virtuous among 
men’ *°——disposed them to the left in questions of Church 
and State. The names of the commercial magnates of the 
day lend some confirmation to the suggestion of that affinity 
between religious radicalism and business acumen which 


250 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


envious contemporaries expressed in their sneers at the 
“Presbyterian old usurer,”’ “devout misers,” and “extorting 
Ishban.” °° The four London members elected in 1661 had 
not only filled the ordinary civic offices, but had held be- 
tween them the governorship of the East India Company, 
the deputy-governorship of the Levant Company, and the 
masterships of the Salters and Drapers Companies; two of 
them were said to be Presbyterians, and two Independents.*' 
Of the committee of leading business men who advised 
Charles II’s Government on questions of commercial policy, 
some, like Sir Patience Ward and Michael Godfrey, repre- 
sented the ultra-Protestantism of the City, while others, like 
Thomas Papillon and the two Houblons, were members of 
the French Huguenot church in London.** In spite of the 
bitter commercial rivalry with Holland, both Dutch capital 
and Dutch ideas found an enthusiastic welcome in Lon- 
don.*? Sir George Downing, Charles II’s envoy at the 
Hague, who endeavored to acclimatize Dutch banking meth- 
ods in England, and who, according to Clarendon, was one 
of the intriguers who prepared the war of 1665-7, had been 
reared in the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and 
had been a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey.*°° 
Paterson, who supplied the idea of a joint-stock banking 
corporation, which Michael Godfrey popularized in the City 
and Montagu piloted through Parliament, was, like the mag- 
nificent Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had haunted 
the Hague in the days when it was the home of disconsolate 
Whigs. Yarranton, most ingenious of projectors, had 
been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and his book was 
a long sermon on the virtues of the Dutch.*°? Defoe, who 
wrote the idyll of the bourgeoisie in his Complete English 
Tradesman, was born of nonconformist parents, and was 
intended for the ministry before, having failed in trade, 
he took up politics and literature.*°* In his admirable study 
of the iron industry, Mr. Ashton has shown that the most 


TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 253 


eminent iron-masters of the eighteenth century belonged as 
a rule to the Puritan connection.*%* They had their prototype 
in the seventeenth century in Baxter’s friend, Thomas Foley, 
“who from almost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum 
or more by iron works.” *° 

To such a generation, a creed which transformed the 
acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into 
a moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not that religion 
was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave 
it a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of eco- 
nomic enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some re- 
semblance to those associated later with the name of Smiles. 
The good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the 
economic man. | 


IV. THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 


To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn 
the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with 
them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the 
economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer 
than they are today, gave a timely stimulus to economic 
efficiency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modified the 
traditional attitude towards social obligations. For the spon- 
taneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the rule 
of English public life a century before the philosophy of 
it was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was 
responsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious move- 
ments in the world of affairs—the discrediting of the ideal 
of a paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of 
central control over local administration, the dislocation 
caused by the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the 
shifting of industry from its accustomed seats—it is per- 
haps not fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one 


254 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


force contributing to the change in social policy which is 
noticeable after the middle of the century. 
The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow. 
‘To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous 
| discharge of private duties—how necessary! Yet how read- 
ily perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social 
‘obligations beyond and above them! ‘To insist that the in- 
‘dividual is responsible, that no man can save his brother, that 
the essence of religion is the contact of the soul with its 
Maker, how true and indispensable! But how easy to slip 
from that truth into the suggestion that society is without 
responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the so- 
cial order and its consequences are not even the scaffolding 
by which men may climb to greater heights, but something 
external, alien and irrelevant—something, at best, indiffer- 
ent to the life of the spirit, and, at worse, the sphere of the 
letter which killeth and of the reliance on works which en- 
‘snares the soul into the slumber of death! In emphasizing 
that God’s Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not 
always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of 


God’s Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false antith-> 


esis between the social mechanism and the life of the spirit, 


which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for © 


the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy 


of the individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satis- ~ 


faction at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has 
commented on the manner in which “‘the appeal of the Evan- 
gelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal of 
Benthamite Liberals to individual energy.” *°* The same 


— 


affinity between religious and social interests found an even | 


clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the seven- 


teenth century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if 


not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an in- 


dividualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of 
the social fabric as compared with personal character. 


> mee 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 255 


A practical example of that change of emphasis is given 
by the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and 
of Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of en- 
closing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time to 
time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of that 
period, from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century 
to Laud in the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of re- 
ligious teachers had been one of condemnation. Sermon 
after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet—not to mention 
Statutes and Royal Commissions—had been launched 
against depopulation. The appeal had been, not merely to 
public policy, but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their 
different degrees, are members of one Christian common- 
wealth, within which the law of charity must bridle the cor- 
roding appetite for economic gain. In such a mystical cor- 
poration, knit together by mutual obligations, no man may 
press his advantage to the full, for no man may seek to 
live “outside the body of the Church.” 

Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentlemen, 
who had been the obstructive agents of local administration, 
the practical application of such doctrines had always been 
intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament struck the 
weapon of administrative law from the hands of the Crown, 
it had ceased altogether. But the politics of Westminster 
were not those of village and borough. The events which 
seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to close the revolu- 
tion seemed to the left wing of the victorious army only 
to begin it. In that earliest and most turbulent of English 
democracies, where buff-coat taught scripture politics to his 
general, the talk was not merely of political, but of social, re- 
construction. The program of the Levellers, who more than 
any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the 
unprivileged classes, included a demand, not only for annual 
or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution 
of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the 


256 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


veto of the House of Lords, but also that “you would have 
laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have 
them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.” *° 
Theoretical communism, repudiated by the leading Level- 
lers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, on 
whose behalf Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common 
people of England, by joynt consent of person and purse, 
have caste out Charles, our Norman oppressour . . . the 
land now is to returne into the joynt hands of those who 
have conquered, that is the commonours,” and that the vic- 
tory over the King was incomplete, as long as “wee... 
remayne slaves still to the kingly power in the hands of 
lords of manors.” *°° 

Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that 
the pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering 
of traditional authority seemed for a moment to make all 
things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of 
dull oppression, started to life, and in several Midland coun- 
ties the peasants rose to pull down the hated hedges. At 
Leicester, where in 1649 there were rumors of a popular 
movement to throw down the enclosures of the neighboring 
forest, the City Council took the matter up. A petition was 
drafted, setting out the economic and social evils attending 
enclosure, and proposing the establishment of machinery to 
check it, consisting of a committee without whose assent en- 
closing was not to be permitted. A local minister was in- 
structed to submit the petition to Parliament, “which hath 
still a watchful eye and open ear to redress the common 
grievances of the nation.’”’*°” The agent selected to present 
the city’s case was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamph- 
leteer, who for several years attacked the depopulating land- 
lord with all the fervor of Latimer, though with even less 
than Latimer’s success. 

Half a century before, such commotions would have been 
followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 257 


of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the 
meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of pub- 
lic policy towards the movement had begun to change. Con- 
fiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a 
revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on a 
smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reforma- 
tion. As land changed hands, customary relations were 
shaken and new interests were created. Enclostire, as Moore 
complained,*® was being pushed forward by means of law 
suits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected 
that City merchants and members of the Committee for 
Compounding, some of whom had found land speculation a 
profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal 
to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State in- 
terference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than 
a century. 

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reform- 
ers should have found the open ear of Parliament impene- 
trably closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the 
political and economic environment which had changed. 
The revolution in thought was equally profound. The the- 
oretical basis of the policy of protecting the peasant by pre- 
venting enclosure had been a conception of landownership 
which regarded its rights and its duties as inextricably inter- 
woven. Property was not merely a source of income, but a 
public function, and its use was limited by social obligations 
and necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes 
who had taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy 
could make no truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared 
when the Restoration Parliament swept away military ten- 
ures, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an excise, 
the financial burden previously borne by themselves. 

The theory which took its place, and which was to be- 
come in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that 


258 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


expressed by Locke, when he described property as a right 
anterior to the existence of the State, and argued that “the 
supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his 
property without his own consent.” But Locke merely 
poured into a philosophical mould ideas which had been 
hammered out in the stress of political struggles, and which 
were already the commonplace of landowner and merchant. 
The view of society held by that part of the Puritan move- 
ment which was socially and politically influential had been 
expressed by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the 
democrats in the army. It was that only the freeholders 
really constituted the body politic, and that they could use 
their property as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations 
to any superior, or by the need of consulting the mass of 
men, who were mere tenants at will, with no fixed interest or 
share in the land of the kingdom.** Naturally, this change 
of ideas had profound reactions on agrarian policy. For- 
merly a course commending itself to all public-spirited per- 
sons, the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the 
program of a sect of religious and political radicals. 
When Major-General Whalley in 1656 introduced a meas- 
ure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons, 
framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities 
of Leicester, there was an instant outcry from members that 
it would “destroy property,” and the bill was refused a sec- 
ond reading.** After the Restoration the tide began to run 
more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had already 
become the hobby of the country gentleman. Experts advo- 
cated it on economic grounds, and legislation to facilitate it 
was introduced into Parliament. Though its technique still 
remained to be elaborated, the attitude which was to be de- 
cisive in the eighteenth century had already been crystal- 
lized. 

The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was 
not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 259 


omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who streamed 
back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no mood to 
countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, 
of the administrative interference with the rights of prop- 
erty which had infuriated them in the Government of 
Charles I. It was that opinion as to social policy had 
changed, and changed not least among men of religion them- 
selves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the 
law of nature, is already coming to be identified by the pious 
with the operation of the providential plan, which is the law 
of God. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and 
grain. Each man knows best what his land is suited to pro- 
duce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving 
him free to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim that 
every one by the light of nature and reason will do that 
which makes for his greatest advantage. . . . The advance- 
ment of private persons will be the advantage of the pub- 
Liisa 

It is significant that such considerations were adduced, 
not by an economist, but by a minister. For the argument 
was ethical as well as economic, and, when Moore appealed 
to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary in- 
terests, he provoked the retort that a judicious attention to 
pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened 
morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is— 
to use the favorite catchword of the age—“regulation,” and 
regulation is possible only if they work under the eye of an 
employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Res- 
toration, the first, and most neglected, virtue of the poor is 
industry. Common rights encourage idleness by offering a 
precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought to 
be at work for a master. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that the admonitions of religious teachers against the wick- 
edness of joining house to house and field to field should 
almost entirely cease. Long the typical example of unchar- 


260 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


itable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not merely 
economically expedient, but morally beneficial. Baxter, with 
all his scrupulousness—partly, perhaps, because of his scru- 
pulousness—differs from most earlier divines in giving a 
qualified approval to enclosure “done in moderation by a 
pious man,” for the characteristic reason that a master can 
establish a moral discipline among his employees, which they 
would miss if they worked for themselves. What matters, 
in short, is not their circumstances, but their character. If 
they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians. Oppor- 
tunities for spiritual edification are more important than the 
mere material environment. If only the material environ- 
ment were not itself among the forces determining men’s 
capacity to be edified! 

The temper which deplored that the open-field village was 
not a school of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and 
poor relief an even more shattering criticism. There is no 
province of social life in which the fashioning of a new 
scale of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly 
revealed, In the little communities of peasants and crafts- 
men which composed medieval England, all, when Heaven 
sent a bad harvest, had starved together, and the misery of 
the sick, the orphan and the aged had appeared as a per- 
sonal calamity, not as a social problem. Apart from a few 
precocious theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal 
and secular system of provision for distress, the teaching 
most characteristic of medieval writers had been that the re- 
lief of the needy was a primary obligation on those who had 
means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is typical, quotes 
with approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those 
who cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that 
property is stewardship, and concludes—a conclusion not al- 
ways drawn from that well-worn phrase—that to withhold 
alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is mortal 
sin.** Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical glamour 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 261 


both to poverty and to the compassion by which poverty 
was relieved, for poor men were God’s friends. At best, the 
poor were thought to represent our Lord in a peculiarly in- 
timate way—“‘in that sect,” as Langland said, “our Saviour 
saved all mankind’”—and it was necessary for the author of 
a religious manual to explain that the rich, as such, were not 
necessarily hateful to God.** At worst, men reflected that 
the prayers of the poor availed much, and that the sinner 
had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf of bread to a 
beggar, even though a curse went with it. The alms be- 
stowed today would be repaid a thousandfold, when the soul 
took its dreadful journey amid rending briars and scorch- 
ing flames. 


If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon, 
Everie nighte and alle, 

Sit thee down and put them on, 
And Christe receive thy saule. 


If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane, 
Everie nighte and alle, 

The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane, 
And Christe receive thy saule. 


If ever thou gavest meate or drinke, 
Everie nighte and alle, 

The fire shall never make thee shrinke, 
And Christe receive thy saule. 


If meate or drinke thou gavest nane, 
Everie nighte and alle, 

The fire will burne thee to the bare bane, 
And Christe receive thy saule. 


This ae nighte, this ae nighte, 
Everie nighte and alle, 

Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte, 
And Christe receive thy saule.1*® 


262 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


The social character of wealth, which had been the essence 
of the medieval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in 
the sixteenth century with redoubled emphasis, precisely 
because the growing individualism of the age menaced the 
traditional conception. ‘The poor man,” preached Latimer, 
“hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man 


ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and | 


to comfort him withal.”*7 Nor had that sovereign indif- 
ference to the rigors of the economic calculus disappeared, 
when, under the influence partly of humanitarian represen- 
tatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of religious 
reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the 
threads of social administration into their own hands, the 
statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organ- 
ize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after three 
generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out 
vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the mo- 
mentous admission was made that its cause was economic 
distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the whip 
had no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve. 
The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory 
poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on 
work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove 


lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the sys-__ 
tem was administered with fair regularity. But the Eliza- | 
bethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with dis- | 
astrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nine- 
teenth centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic — 
distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last link in _ 


a chain of measures—the prevention of evictions, the control 
of food supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employ- 
ment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—in- 
tended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. 
Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 263 


seventeenth century were prolific in the private charity which 
founded alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to 
provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The 
appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of 
reverence. 


‘Tt was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay, 
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.118 


“What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar 
on his death-bed to one who commended his charities. “It 
would have been but a suitable return for me to have given 
all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms 
heresand there **° 

It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, . 
both private charity and public relief should fall on evil days. 
In London, charitable endowments seem to have suffered 
from more than ordinary malversation, and there were com- 
plaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the Hospi- 
tals was seriously reduced.*”° In the country, the records of 
Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in which the 
machinery of presentment by constables to justices has 
broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves are multi- 
plied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander to and 
fro at their will.*** The administrative collapse of the Eliza- 
bethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and 
twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that 
the sections in it relating to the provision of employment 
were a dead letter.*°? Always unpopular with the local au- 
thorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and 
expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pres- 
sure by the Central Government, they should, except here 
and there, have been neglected. What is more significant, 
however, than the practical deficiencies in the administra- 
tion of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion, which 


264 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory 
of which both private charity and public relief had been the 
expression, 

“The generall rule of all England,” wrote a pamphleteer 
in 1646, “is to whip and punish the wandring beggars .. . 
and so many justices execute one branch of that good Stat- 
ute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of 
charitie, they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses 
and convenient places to set the poore to work.” *’* The 
House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the 
complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the 
county justices should be required to see that stocks of ma- 
terial were provided as the law required,*** and the question 
of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in dis- 
tress should be found employment was on several occasions 
referred to committees of the House.””° Nothing seems, 
however, to have come of these proposals, nor was the 
Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on work’ that which 
was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the ad- 
mission that distress was the result, not of personal defi- 
ciencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that its 
victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the 
growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid 
scepticism as was later directed against the Speenhamland 
policy by the reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it 
saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the 
punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penal- 
ties on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid 
less emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty 
of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly been 
turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed 
against improvidence and idleness, The characteristic senti- 
ment was that of Milton’s friend, Hartlib: “The law of God 
saith, ‘he that will not work, let him not eat.’ This would 
be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if .. . 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 265 


none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for 
ater 126 

The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of 
public activity provoked by the growth of pauperism be- 
tween 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound 
business principles. by means of a corporation which would 
combine profit w:th philanthropy, was being sedulously 
preached by a small group of reformers.*?’ Parliament took 
it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the relief and em- 
ployment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under 
which a company was to be established with power to appre- 
hend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and 
whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other poor 
persons, including children without means of maintenance.*** 
Right years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an 
Act of such extreme severity as almost to recall the sugges- 
tion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that 
vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, 
since offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant 
who failed to satisfy the justices that he had a good reason 
for being on the roads should be arrested and punished as a 
sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.’ 

The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the 
parade of a spurious religion, which sacrificed character to 
a formal piety, was older than the Reformation, but it had 
been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had 
denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the 
Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic 
charity, as a bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness 
and demoralization. “I conclude that all the large givings 
of the papists,’ preached an English divine in the reign 
of Elizabeth, “of which at this day many make so great 
brags, because they be not done in a reverent regard of the 
commandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being 
touched with the calamities of the needy, but for to be well 


266 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be 
prayed for after they are dead . . . are indeed no alms, but 
pharisaical trumpets.” **° The rise of a commercial civi- 
lization, the reaction against the authoritarian social policy 
of the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism among the 
middle classes, all combined in the next half-century to 
sharpen the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition 
which made the discipline of character by industry and self- 
denial the center of its ethical scheme, the Puritan moralist 
was undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even the seed 
of the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to 
beg its bread, and met the taunt that the repudiation of good 
works was the cloak for a conscienceless egoism with the 
retort that the easy-going open-handedness of the senti-— 
mentalist was not less selfish in its motives and was more 
corrupting to its objects. “As for idle beggars,’ wrote 
Steele, “happy for them if fewer people spent their foolish 
pity upon their bodies, and if more shewed some wise 
compassion upon their souls.’’*** That the greatest of evils 
is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circum- 
stances, but of their own “idle, irregular and wicked 
courses,’ that the truest charity is not to enervate them by 
relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be 
unnecessary—such doctrines turned severity from a sin into 
a duty, and froze the impulse of natural pity with the as- 
surance that, if indulged, it would perpetuate the suffering 
which it sought to allay. 

Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more 
curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who 
ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in 
bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose con- 
tinuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a 
lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex 
owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan 
moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the ai 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 267° 


reward of ethical superiority. “No question,’ argued a 
Puritan pamphleteer, “but it [riches] should be the portion 
rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for 
them; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well 
as of the life to come.” *? The demonstration that distress 
is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the 
lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular 
with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restora- 
tion, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could 
not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed 
with a shout of applause. 

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as 
the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the 
poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself 
for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of 
religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger 
of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of 
Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of 
society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy- 
going indulgence undermined character, the theme of the 
economist was that it was economically disastrous and finan- 
cially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, 
“men and women growing so idle and proud that they will 
not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for 
maintenance.” It discourages thrift; “if shame or fear of 
punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no 
more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old 
age his recess from labour or care.” It keeps up wages, 
since “it encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to im- 
pose what wages they please upon their labours; and herein 
they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation 
that, when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not 
work for less wages than when they were dear.” *** To the 
landowner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier who 
grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of religious 


A. 


268 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


thought now brought the comforting assurance that moral- 
ity itself would be favored by a reduction of both. 

~ As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century 
was to prove, there is no touchstone, except the treatment 
of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social 
philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards 
the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the 
way. Such utterances on the subject of poverty were merely 
one example of a general attitude, which appeared at times 
to consign to collective perdition almost the whole of the 
wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age 
which worshiped property as the foundation of the social 
order, the mere laborer seemed something less than a full 
citizen. It was partly the result of the greatly increased 
influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the 
Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a 
ruthless materialism, determined at all costs to conquer 
world-markets from France and Holland, and prepared to 
sacrifice every other consideration to their economic ambi- 
tions. It was partly that, in spite of a century of large- 
scale production in textiles, the problems of capitalist in- 
dustry and of a propertyless proletariat were still too novel 
for their essential features to be appreciated. Even those 
writers, like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on 
the wickedness of extortionate prices and unconscionable 
interest, rarely thought of applying their principles to the 
subject of wages. Their social theory had been designed 
for an age of petty agriculture and industry, in which per- 
sonal relations had not yet been superseded by the cash 
nexus, and the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little 
removed in economic status from the half-dozen journey- 
men or laborers whom he employed. In a world increas- 
ingly dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mine- 
owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of 
master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 269 


economic realities as leads the twentieth century to talk of 
employers and employed, long after the individual employer 
has been converted into an impersonal corporation. 

In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx 
observes that “the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper 
hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, 
pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound 
man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other 
bond between man and man than naked self-interest and 
callous cash payment.’ *** An interesting illustration of 
his thesis might be found in the discussions of the economics 
of employment by English writers of the period between 
1660 and 1760. Their characteristic was an attitude 
towards the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher 
than that general in the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, and which has no modern parallel except in the be- 
havior of the less reputable of white colonists towards 
colored labor. The denunciations of the “luxury, pride and 
sloth” **° of the English wage-earners of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries are, indeed, almost exactly identical 
with those directed against African natives today. It is 
complained that, compared with the Dutch, they are self- 
indulgent and idle; that they want no more than a bare sub- 
sistence, and will cease work the moment they obtain it; 
that, the higher their wages, the more—“so licentious are 
they” **°—they spend upon drink; that high prices, there- 
fore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel 
the wage-earner to be more industrious; and that high 
wages are not a blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely 
conduce to ‘weekly debauches.” 

When such doctrines were general, it was natural that 
the rigors of economic exploitation should be preached as 
a public duty, and, with a few exceptions, the writers of 
the period differed only as to the methods by which severity 
could most advantageously be organized. Pollexfen and 


minnie h 


270 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by 
reducing the number of days kept as holidays. Bishop 
Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes, 
suggested that “sturdy beggars should . . . be seized and 
made slaves to the public for a certain term of years.” 
Thomas Alcock, who was shocked at the workman’s taste 
for snuff, tea and ribbons, proposed the revival of sump- 
tuary legislation.**’ The writers who advanced schemes for 
reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of 
punishment and of training, were innumerable. All were 
agreed that, on moral no less than on economic grounds, it 
was vital that wages should be reduced. The doctrine after- 
wards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote, “every 
one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept 
poor, or they will never be industrious,” *** was the trit- 
est commonplace of Restoration economists. It was not 
argued; it was accepted as self-evident. 

When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might 
not be desirable to reéstablish slavery, it was not to be ex- 
pected that the sufferings of the destitute would wring their 
hearts with social compunction. The most curious feature 
in the whole discussion, and that which is most sharply 
in contrast with the long debate on pauperism carried on in 
the sixteenth century, was the resolute refusal to admit 
that society had any responsibility for the causes of distress. 
Tudor divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle 
rogues. But the former always, and the latter ultimately, 
regarded pauperism primarily as a social phenomenon pro- 
duced by economic dislocation, and the embarrassing ques- 
tion put by the genial Harrison—‘“at whose handes shall 
the bloude of these men be required?” **°—was never far 
from the minds even of the most cynical. Their successors 
after the Restoration were apparently quite unconscious that 
it was even conceivable that there might be any other cause 
of poverty than the moral failings of the poor. The prac- 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 271 


tical conclusion to be drawn from so comfortable a creed 
was at once extremely simple and extremely agreeable. It 
was not to find employment under the Act of 1601, for to 
do that was only “to render the poor more bold.” It was 
to surround the right to relief with obstacles such as those 
contained in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not 
be avoided, in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for 
the rest, to increase the demand for labor by reducing 
wages. 

The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief 
might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also 
to deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philoso- 
phers. But the theory that distress was due, not to economic 
circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of 
1834 called “individual improvidence and vice,” was firmly 
established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system 
which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been 
formulated. The essence of that system was admirably 
expressed a century later by a Scottish divine as “the prin- 
ciple that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right 
on other men or on society for existence.” **° Dr. Chalmers’ 
attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puritan 
moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed 
themselves on Nassau Senior,*** before he set his hand to 
that brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report, 
which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the 
north of England, was to be one of the pillars of the social 
policy of the nineteenth century. | 

It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of 
Puritan ethics without emphasizing the enormous contribu- 
tion of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress. 
The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual in- 
dependence which nerves the individual to stand alone 
against the powers of this world, and in England, where 
squire and parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence 


272 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 


of the lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, 
as a menace at once to society and to the Church, it is 
probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity 
than to any other single movement. The virtues of enter- 
prise, diligence and thrift are the indispensable foundation 
of any complex and vigorous civilization. It was Puritan- 
ism which, by investing them with a supernatural sanction, 
turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and 
a religion. Nor would it be difficult to find notable repre- 
sentatives of the Puritan spirit in whom the personal aus- 
terity, which was the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was 
combined with a profound consciousness of social solidarity, 
which was the noblest aspect of that which it displaced. 
Firmin the philanthropist, and Bellers the Quaker, whom 
Owen more than a century later hailed as the father of 
his doctrines, were pioneers of Poor Law reform. The 
Society of Friends, in an age when the divorce between 
religion and social ethics was almost complete, met the 
prevalent doctrine, that it was permissible to take such gain 
as the market offered, by insisting on the obligation of good 
conscience and forbearance in economic transactions, and on 
the duty to make the honorable maintenance of the brother 
in distress a common charge.**” 

The general climate and character of a country are not 
altered, however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks 
which rise into an ampler air. The distinctive note of Puri- 
tan teaching was different. It was individual responsibility, 
not social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery 
of others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown 
of glory the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his 
solitary contest with a hostile world, and dismissed concern 
with the social order as the prop of weaklings and the Capua 
of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects of that 
attitude were momentous for the future. It is sometimes 
suggested that the astonishing outburst of industrial activ- 


5 


THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 273 


ity which took place after 1760 created a new type of 
economic character, as well as a new system of economic 
organization. In reality, the ideal which was later to carry 
all before it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and 
captain of industry, was well established among Englishmen 
before the end of the seventeenth century. Among the 
numerous forces which had gone to form it, some not in- 
considerable part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis 
on the life of business enterprise as the appropriate field for 
Christian endeavor, and on the qualities needed for success 
in it, which was characteristic of Puritanism, These quali- 
ties, and the admiration of them, remained, when the re- 
ligious reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had 
weakened or disappeared. 


3 ty She 


ars xe 2 





CHAP EER eV 


CONCLUSION 


“Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sermon, 
beynge asked if he had bene at the sermon that day, answered, 
yea. I praye you, said he, how lyked you hym? Mary, sayed he, 
even as I lyked hym alwayes—a sedicious fellow.” 

LATIMER, Seven Sermons before King Edward VI. 





CHAPTER V 
CONCLUSION 


SociETIEs, like individuals, have their moral crises and their 
spiritual revolutions. The student can observe the results 
which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without 
presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the fire 
which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit. 
The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its 
magnificent promise of fruitful action and of intellectual 
light; the abdication of the Christian Churches from de- 
partments of economic conduct and social theory long 
claimed as their province; the general acceptance by thinkers 
of a scale of ethical values, which turned the desire for 
pecuniary gain from a perilous, if natural, frailty into the 
idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society—such 
movements are written large over the history of the tem- 
pestuous age which lies between the Reformation and the 
full light of the eighteenth century. Their consequences 
have been worked into the very tissue of modern civiliza- 
tion. Posterity still stands too near their source to discern / 
the ocean into which these streams will flow. 

In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is 
the tritest of commonplaces. But social psychology con- 
tinues too often to be discussed in serene indifference to 
the categories of time and place, and economic interests are 
still popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom 
over which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though 
inherited dispositions may be constant from generation to 
generation, the system of valuations, preferences and ideals 
-—~the social environment within which individual character 

277 


278 CONCLUSION 


functions—is in process of continuous change, and it is in 
the conception of the place to be assigned to economic in- 
terests in the life of society that change has in recent cen- 
turies been most comprehensive in its scope, and most sen- 
sational in its consequences. he isolation of economic 
aims as a specialized object of concentrated and systematic 
effort, the erection of economic criteria into an independent 
and authoritative standard of social expediency, are phe- 
nomena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity, 
appear, at least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively 

« |recent date in the history of later civilizations. The con- 
flict between the economic outlook of East and West, which 
impresses the traveller today, finds a parallel in the con- 
trast between medieval and modern economic ideas, which 
strikes the historian. 

The elements which combined to produce that revolution 
are too numerous to be summarized in any neat formula. 
But, side by side with the expansion of trade and the rise | 
of new classes to political power, there was a further cause, 
which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least funda- 
mental. It was the contraction of the territory within which 
the spirit of religion was conceived to run. The criticism 
which dismisses the concern of Churches with economic 
relations and social organization as a modern innovation 
finds little support in past history. What requires explana- 
tion is not the view that these matters are part of the 
province of religion, but the view that they are not. (When | 
the age of the Reformation begins, economics is still a 
branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activi- 
ties are treated as falling within a single scheme, whose 
character is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; 
the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the 
legitimacy of economic transactions is tried by reference, 
less to the movements of the market, than to moral stand- 
ards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian 


CONCLUSION 279 


Church; the Church itself is regarded as a society wielding | i> 
theoretical, and sometimes practical, authority in social af- 
fairs. The secularization of political thought, which was to 
be the work of the next two centuries, had profound re- 
actions on social speculation, and by the Restoration the 
whole perspective, at least in England, has been revolution 
ized.}/ Religion has been converted from the keystone which 
holds together the social edifice into one department within] (' 
it, and the idea of a rule of right is replaced by economic 
expediency as the arbiter of policy and the criterion of con- 
duct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to survive, 
must devote a reasonable attention to economic interest, 
man seems sometimes to have become an economic animal, 
who will be prudent, nevertheless, if he takes due precau- 
tions to assure his spiritual well-being? 

The result is an attitude which forms so fundamental a 
part of modern political thought, that both its precarious 
philosophical basis, and the contrast which it offers with the 
conceptions of earlier generations, are commonly forgotten. 
Its essence is a dualism which regards the secular and the 
religious aspects of life, not as successive stages within a 
larger unity, but as parallel and independent provinces, gov- 
erned by different laws, judged by different standards, and 
amenable to different authorities. To the most representa- 
tive minds of the Reformation, as of the Middle Ages, a 
philosophy which treated the transactions of commerce and 
the institutions of society as indifferent to religion would 
have appeared, not merely morally reprehensible, but intel- 
lectually absurd. Holding as their first assumption that the 
ultimate social authority is the will of God, and that tem-( 
poral interests are a transitory episode in the life of spirits 
which are eternal, they state the rules to which the social 
conduct of the Christian must conform, and, when circum- 
stances allow, organize the discipline by which those rules 
may be enforced. By their successors in the eighteenth cen- 


a 


280 CONCLUSION 


tury the philosophy of Indifferentism, though rarely formu- 
lated as a matter of theory, is held in practice as a truism 
which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to question, 
since it is in the heart of the individual that religion has its 
throne, and to externalize it in rules and institutions is to 
tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal. Naturally, 
therefore, they formulate the ethical principles of Christian- 
ity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate 
with any precision their application to commerce, finance, 
and the ownership of property. Thus the conflict between 
religion and those natural economic ambitions which the 
thought of an earlier age had regarded with suspicion is 
suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind 
between them. The former takes as its province the in- 
dividual soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his 
fellows in the activities of business and the affairs of society. 
Provided that each keeps to its own territory, peace is 
_-assured. They cannot collide, for they can never meet. 
“ae History is a stage where forces which are within human 
/  ) control contend and cooperate with forces which are not. 
The change of opinion described in these pages drew nour- 
ishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan 
revolution had been followed by a dazzling outburst of 
economic enterprise, and the transformation of the material 
environment prepared an atmosphere in which a judicious 
moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom 
_and the sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion 
' as well as the outer. The march of external progress woke 
sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to applaud its 
triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute tension 
between the claims of religion and the glittering allurements 
of a commercial civilization, such as had tormented the age 
of the Reformation. | 
It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, diffidence 
of men who were conscious that traditional doctrines of 


CONCLUSION 281 


social ethics, with their impracticable distrust of economic 
motives, belonged to the conditions of a vanished age, but 
who lacked the creative energy to state them anew, in a 
form applicable to the needs of a more complex and mobile 
social order. It was partly that political changes had gone 
far to identify the Church of England with the ruling 
aristocracy, so that, while in France, when the crash came, 
many of the lower clergy threw in their lot with the tiers 
état, in England it was rarely that the officers of the Church 
did not echo the views of society which commended them- 
selves to the rulers of the State. It was partly that, to one 
important body of opinion, the very heart of religion was a 
spirit which made indifference to the gross world of external 
circumstances appear, not a defect, but an ornament of the 
soul. Untrammelled by the silken chains which bound tlie 
Establishment, and with a great tradition of discipline be- 
hind them, the Nonconformist Churches might seem to 
have possessed opportunities of reasserting the social obliga- 
tions of religion with a vigor denied to the Church of Eng- 
land. What impeded their utterance was less a weakness 
than the most essential and distinctive of their virtues. 
Founded on the repudiation of the idea that human effort 
could avail to win salvation, or human aid to assist the pil- 
grim in his lonely quest, they saw the world of business and 
society as a battlefield, across which character could march 
triumphant to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the 
architect’s hand to set them in their place as the founda- 
tions of the Kingdom of Heaven. It did not occur to 
them that character is social, and society, since it is the 
expression of character, spiritual, Thus the eye is some- 
times blinded by light itself. | 
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next. 
Few will refuse their admiration to the magnificent con- 
ception of a community penetrated from apex to foundation 
by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great 


282 CONCLUSION 


reformers, not less than of the better minds of the Middle 
Ages. But, in order to subdue the tough world of material 
interests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy 
with its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them. 
The Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing 
and a fair trial, and those who will not give him his due 
are wont to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables 
by taking his due and something over. Common sense and 
a respect for realities are not less graces of the spirit than 
moral zeal. The paroxysms of virtuous fury, with which 
the children of light denounced each new victory of eco- 
nomic enterprise as yet another stratagem of Mammon, 
disabled them for the staff-work of their campaign, which 
needs a cool head as well as a stout heart. Their obstinate 
refusal to revise old formulz in the light of new facts ex- 
posed them helpless to a counter-attack, in which the whole 
fabric of their philosophy, truth and fantasy alike, was 
overwhelmed together. They despised knowledge, and 
knowledge destroyed them. 

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the 
splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, 
which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were 
transforming the face of material civilization, and of which 
Iengland was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If, 
however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are 
bad masters. Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn 
the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end 
the wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the 
naive and uncritical worship of economic power, which is 
the mood of unreason too often engendered in those whom 
that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no 
light. Its result is not seldom a world in which men com- 
mands a mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an 
organization which has every perfection except that of 
motion. 


CONCLUSION 283 


Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein, 
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein. 


The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from 
the armor of Reason, pierces the lazy caricature which 
masquerades beneath that sacred name, to flatter its fol- 
lowers with the smiling illusion of progress won from the 
mastery of the material environment by a race too selfish 
and superficial to determine the purpose to which its 
triumphs shall be applied. Mankind may wring her secrets 
from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy them- 
selves; they may command the Ariels of heat and motion, 
and bind their wings in helpless frustration, while they 
wrangle over the question of the master whom the im- 
prisoned genii shall serve. Whether the chemist shall pro- 
vide them with the means of life or with tri-nitro-toluol 
and poison gas, whether industry shall straighten the bent 
back or crush it beneath heavier burdens, depends on an act 
of choice between incompatible ideals, for which no increase 
in the apparatus of civilization at man’s disposal is in itself 
a substitute. Economic efficiency is a necessary element in 
the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incor- 
rigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to 
convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object 
is to destroy efficiency itself. For the condition of effective 
action in a complex civilization is codperation. And the 
condition of cooperation is agreement, both as to the ends to 
which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its 
success is to be judged. 

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a stand- 
ard of values, by which the position to be assigned to dif- 
ferent objects may be determined. In a world of limited 
resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged 
and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take 
account of economic possibilities. But it cannot itself be 


Se 


284 CONCLUSION 


merely economic, since the comparative importance of eco- 
nomic and of other interests—the sacrifice, for example, of | 
material goods worth incurring in order to extend leisure, © 
or develop education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point 
on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on 
some conception of the requirements of human nature as 
a whole, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evi- 
dently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other 
needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a 
rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension_ 
of their relative significance. “Whatever the world thinks,” 
,wrote Bishop Berkeley, “he who hath not much meditated 
upon God, the human mind and the summum bonum may 
‘es possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most in- 
dubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.” 
The philosopher of today, who bids us base our hopes of 
progress on knowledge inspired by love, does not differ 
from the Bishop so much, perhaps, as he would wish. The 
most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the 
existing economic order, and too many of the projects ad- 
vanced for reconstructing it, break down through their 
4 neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men 
have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate 
them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and 
impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic 
organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry 
is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of out- 
raged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not 
purely economic. A reasonable view of its possible modi- 
fications must recognize that natural appetites may be puri- 
fied or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure 
they already have been, by being submitted to the control 
of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by 
the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and 
servile occupations, the medieval insistence that riches exist 


CONCLUSION 285 


for man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous outburst, 
“there is no wealth but life,” the argument of the Socialist 
who urges that production should be organized for service, 
not for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize the 
instrumental character of economic activities by reference 
to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man. 

Of that nature and its possibilities the Christian Church 
was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed 
in these pages, to hold by definition a conception distinc- 
tively its own. It was therefore committed to the formula- 
tion of a social theory, not as a philanthropic gloss upon the 
main body of its teaching, but as a vital element in a creed 
concerned with the destiny of men whose character is 
formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or 
starved, by the commerce of the market-place and the in- 
stitutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period 
and place, its philosophy had as its center a determination 
to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic 
appetites, which have their place, and an important place, 
in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appe- 
tites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin 
to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an 
attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical 
ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world 
of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too 
often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble 
in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted 
texture of individual character and social conduct. That 
practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism 
which should need no emphasis. But in a world where 
principles and conduct are unequally mated, men are to be 
judged by their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends 
at which they aim as well as by the success with which they 
attain them. The prudent critic will try himself by his 
achievement rather than by his ideals, and his neighbors, 


286 CONCLUSION 


living and dead alike, by their ideals not less than by their 
achievement. 

Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical 
interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. 
Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social his- 
tory will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the 
weak by the powerful, organized for purposes of economic 
gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened 
by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding 
rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most 
communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality 
in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the 
teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith lies 
deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies 
against which criticism is most commonly directed. It con- 
sists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with 
hardly less naiveté than by the defenders of the established 
order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme 
object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human 
success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not in- 
disposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecu- 
tion, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that 
it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which 
can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Com- 
promise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and 
the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of 
capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the 
State idolatry of the Roman Empire. 

‘Modern capitalism,’ writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely 
irreligious, without internal union, without much public 
spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of pos- 
sessors and pursuers.’ It is that whole system of appetites 
and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to 
hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of 
its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the 


CONCLUSION 287 


ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on 
their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes 
on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the con- 
quest of its material environment resources unknown in 
earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. 
It was against that system, while still in its supple and in- 
sinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside 
the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was un- 
known even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier 
ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. i he 
language in which theologians and preachers expressed their 
horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern 
reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the con- 
tracts of business and the disposition of property may seem 
an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agree- 
able failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, 
it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Pos- 
terity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind 
eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and op- 
pression as from the sober respectability of the judicious 
Paley—who himself, since there are depths below depths, 
was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III. 


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NOTES 


PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 


1 References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the notes 
on subsequent chapters. The following list of recent books and articles 
is not exhaustive, but it may be of some use to those interested in the 
subject. 

E, Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., 
London, 1931 (Eng. trans. by Olive Wyon of his Die Soziallehren der 
Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912); Max Weber, The Protestant 
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London, 1930 (Eng. trans. by Talcott 
Parsons of Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus in 
“Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,” vols. xx (1904) and 
xxi (1905); later reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsarze zur Religions- 
soziologie, 3 vols., Tubingen, 1921); H. Hauser, Les débuts du Capi- 
talisme, Paris, 1927, chap. ii (“Les Idées économiques de Calvin”); B. 
Groethuysen, Origines de Vlesprit bourgeois en France, Paris, 1927; 
Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revo- 
lution, 1640-1660, London, 1930; Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry 
before 1800, London, 1930; W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in 
the Industrial Revolution, London, 1930; R. Pascal, The Social Basis of 
the German Reformation, London, 1933; H. M. Robertson, The Rise of 
Economic Individualism, Cambridge, 1933; A. Fanfani, Le Origini dello 
Spirito Capitalistico in Italia, Milan, 1933, and Cattolicismo e Protes- 
tantesimo nella Formazione Storica del Capitalismo, Milan, 1934 (Eng. 
trans. Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, London, 1935); J. 
Brodrick, S. J.. The Economic Morals of the Jesuits, London, 10934; 
E, D. Bebb, Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660-1800, 
London, 1935. The articles include the following: M. Halbwachs, “Les 
Origines Puritaines due Capitalisme Moderne” (Revue d'histoire et de 
Philosophie réligieuses, March-April, 1925) and “Economistes et His- 
toriens, Max Weber, une vie, un cuvre”’ (Annales d’Histoire Econo- 
mique et Sociale, No. 1, 1929); H. Sée, “Dans quelle mesure Puritains 
et Juifs ont-ils contribué au Progrés due Capitalisme Moderne?” (Revue 
Historique, t. CLV, 1927); Kemper Fullerton, “Calvinism and Capital- 
ism” (Harvard Theological Review, July 1928) ; F. H. Knight, “Histori- 
cal and Theoretical Issues in the Problem of Modern Capitalism” (Jour- 
nal of Economic and Business History, November 1928); Talcott Par- 
sons, “Capitalism in Recent German Literature” (Journal of Political 
Economy, December 1928 and February 1929); P. C. Gordon Walker, 
“Capitalism and the Reformation” (Economic History Review, No- 
vember 1937). 

2For Weber’s life and personality, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 
ein Lebensbild, Tubingen, 1926, and Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Deutsches 

289 


290 NOTES 


Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren, Olden- 
burg, 1932. ; ' 

3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Eng. 
trans. prelose 

4H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism, 
p. Xi. 

5 Weber, op. cit., p. 26. 

6 Weber, op. cit., p. 183. 

7 [bid., p. 183, and note 118 on chap. v: “it would have been easy to 
proceed ... to a regular construction which logically deduced every- 
thing characteristic of modern culture from Protestant nationalism, But 
that sort of thing may be left to the type of dilettante who believes in 
the unity of the group mind and its reducibility to a single formula.” 
“Spiritual” is my rendering of the almost untranslatable “spiritualistische 
kausale.” 

8 See below, note 32 on chap. iv, pp. 247-8, and Max Weber, op. cit., 
pp. 3-II. 

9 Weber, op. cit., 197-8. A chapter expanding the same criticism is 
contained in H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Indi- 
vidualism, pp. 57-87. The best treatment of the subject is that of Bren- 
tano, Die Anfange des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57, and 
Der Wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1923, pp. 363 sq. 

10 See H. M. Robertson, of. cit., pp. 88-110 and 133-67; and J. Brod- 
rick, S. J., The Economic Morals of the Jesuits, which, in addition to 
correcting Robertson’s errors, contains the best account of the economic 
teaching of the Jesuits available in English. 

11 B.g., H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland zur Zeit der 

Reformation herrschenden Nationalokonomischen Ansichten, Leipzig, 
1861; F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, London, 1892, Intro- 
duction; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1808, chap. III; W. 
Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, London, 1910 (see below, 
note 33 on chap. iv). The last work, though published seven yzars after 
the appearance of Weber’s articles, does not refer to them, nor is its 
argument similar to theirs. 
2 g., H. M. Robertson, op. cit., p. xi. “Many writers have taken 
advantage of an unpopularity of Capitalism in the twentieth century to 
employ them [sc. the theories ascribed to Weber] in attacks on Calvinism, 
or on other branches of religion.” The only Guy Fawkes of the gang— 
apart, of course, from myself—detected by Mr. Robertson actually firing 
the train appears to be that implacable incendiary, Mr. Aldous Huxley. 
“Infected,” liké~the arch-conspirator, Weber, “with a deep hatred of 
Capitalism,” we stand with him condemned of “a general tendency to 
undermine the basis of Capitalist society’ (ibid., pp. 207-8). The guilty 
secret is out at last. 

13 Hl, Pirenne, Les Périodes de l’Histoire Sociale due Capitalisme, 1914. 


CHAPTER I 


— 


1J. B. Say, Cours complet d’Economie politique pratique, vol. vi, 18209, 
PP. 351-2. 

2R. Torrens, An Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, Preface, 
p. Xiil. 

8 ae George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921). 

4J. A. Froude, Revival of Romanism, in Short Studies on Great S ub- 
jects, ara ser., 1877, p. 108. 

5J. N. Wiio: From Gerson to Grotius, 1916, pp. 21 seqq. 

6 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. ii, chap. ix, § 124. 

7 Nicholas Oresme, c.1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377. His 
Tractatus de origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum was 
probably written about 1360. The Latin and French texts have been 
edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and extracts are translated by A. E. 
Monroe, Early Economic Thought, 1924, pp. 81-102. Its significance is 
discussed shortly by Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Com- 
merce, Early and Middle Ages (4th ed., 1905, pp. 354-9), and by Wolowski 
in his introduction. The date of the De Usuris of. Laurentius de Rodolfis 
was 1403; a short account of his theories as to the exchanges will be 
found in E. Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der 
Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, 1913, pp. 211-17. The most important 
works of St. Antonino (1389-1459, Archbishop of Florence, 1446) are 
the Summa Theologica, Summa Confessionalis, and De Usuris. Some 
account of his teaching is given by Carl Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaft- 
lichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz, 1904; Schreiber, op. citt., 
pp. 217-23; and Bede Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medieval Economics, 
1914. The full title of Baxter’s work is A Christian Directory: a 
Summ .of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience, 

8 See Chap. IV, p. 206. 

9 Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Comediam (ed. Laca- 
ita), vol. i, p. 579: “Qui facit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui non facit 
vadit ad inopiam” (quoted by G. G. Coulton, Social Life Es Britain from 
the Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 342). 

10 Lanfranc, Elucidarium, lib. ii, p. 18 (in Opera, ed. J. A. Giles). 
See also Vita Sancti Guidonis (Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum, September, 
vol. iv, p. 43): “Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine crimine 
exerceri potuit.” 

11B. L. Manning, The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 19109, p. 
186. 

12 Aquinas, Summa gnc 2a 2%, div. 1, Q. iii, art. viii. 

18 Tbid., 14 2%, div. i, Q. xciv, art. il. 

_ 291 


s 


292 NOTES 


14 The Bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII. 

15 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus (ed. C. C. I. Webb), lib. v, cap. ii 
(“Est autem res publica, sicut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam quod di- 
vini muneris beneficio animatur”), and lib. vi, cap. x, where the analogy 
is worked out in detail. For Henry VIII’s chaplain see Starkey, A 
Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (Early English 
Text Society, Extra Ser., no. xxxii, 1878). 

16 Chaucer, The Persone’s Tale, § 66. 

17 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xix (Select English Works of 
John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, 1871, p. 145). 

18 John of Salisbury, op. cit., lib. vi, cap. x: “Tunc autem totius rei 
publicee salus incolumis preclaraque erit, si superiora membra se im- 
pendant inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respondeant, ut 
singula sint quasi aliorum ad invicem membra.” 

19 Wyclif, op. cit., chaps. ix, x, xi, xvii, passim (Works of Wyclif, 
ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 130, 131, 132, 134, 143). 

20 See, e.g., A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschafts- 
geschichte, 1901, vol. i, chaps. v, vii. His final verdict (p. 458) 
is: ‘Man kann es getrost aussprechen: es gibt wohl keine Periode in der © 
Weltgeschichte, in der die nattirliche Ueberrnacht des Kapitals tiber die 
besitz- und kapitallose Handarbeit rticksichtsloser, freier von sittlichen 
und rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer selbstverstandlichen Konse- 
quenz gewaltet hatte, und bis in die entferntesten Folgen zur Geltung 
gebracht worden ware, als in der Bliitezeit der Florentiner Tuchindustrie.”’ 
The picture drawn by Pirenne of the textile industry in Flanders (Bel- 
gian Democracy: Its Early History, trans. by J. V. Saunders, 1915, pp. 
128-34) is somewhat similar. 

21TIn Jan. 1298/9 there was held a “parliament of carpenters at Mile- 
hende, where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to observe a 
certain ordinance or provision made by the Mayor and Aldermen touch- 
ing their craft,’ and in the following March a “parliament of smiths” 
was formed, with a common chest (Calendar of Early Mayor’s Court 
Rolls of the City of London, 1298-1307, ed. A. H. Thomas, 1924, pp. 
25, 33-4). 

22 The figures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Léon (His- 
toire des Corporations de Métiers, 3rd ed., 1922, pp. 219-20, 224, 226) ; 
those for Frankfurt are given by Bticher (Die Bevélkerung von Frank- 
furt am Main im XIV und XV Jahrhundert, 1886, pp. 103, 146, 605). 
They do not include apprentices, and must not be pressed too far. The 
conclusion of Martin Saint-Léon is: “Il est certain qu’au moyen age 
(abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n’existait pas encore un 
prolétariat, le nombre des ouvriers ne dépassant guére ou n’atteignant 
méme pas celui des maitres” (op. cit., p. 227n.). The towns of Italy 
should be added, as an exception, to those of Flanders, and in any case 
the statement is not generally true of the later Middle Ages, when there 
was certainly a wage-earning proletariat in Germany also (see Lam- 
precht, Zum Verstandnis der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen 
in Deutschland vom 14. sum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift fiir 
Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. i, 1893, pp. 191-263), and even, 
though on a smaller scale, in England. 


NOTES ON CHAPTER I 293 


23 The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned, chap. xxviii (Select Eng- 
lish Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, p. 333). The passage con- 
tains comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in particu- 
lar, gilds, “men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere,” and “marchaun- 
tis, groceris, and vitileris” who “conspiren wickidly togidre that noon of 
hem schal bie over a certeyn pris, though the thing that thei bien be 
moche more worthi” (ibid., pp. 333, 334). 

Wyclif’s argument is of great interest and importance. It is (1), 
that such associations for mutual aid are unnecessary. No special in- 
stitutions are needed to promote fraternity, since, quite apart from 
them, all members of the community are bound to help each other: 
“Alle the goodnes that is in thes gildes eche man owith for to do bi 
comyn fraternyte of Cristendom, by Goddis comaundement.” (2) That 
combinations are a conspiracy against the public. Both doctrines were 
points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitary State, and both 
were to play a large part in subsequent history. They were used by the 
absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century as an argument for State 
control over industry, in place of the obstructive torpor of gilds and bor- 
oughs, and by the individualists of the eighteenth century as an argu- 
ment for free competition. The line of thought as to the relation of 
minor associations to the State runs from Wyclif to Turgot, Rousseau, 
Adam Smith, the Act of the Legislative Assembly in 1792 forbidding 
trade unions (“Les citoyens de méme état ou profession, les ouvriers et 
compagnons d’un art quelconque ne pourront ... former des réglements 
sur leurs prétendus intéréts communs”), and the English Combination 
Acts. 

24 Kayser Sigmunds Reformation aller Standen des Heiligen R6- 
mischen Reichs, printed by Goldast, Collectio Constitutionum Imperial- 
ium, 1713, vol. iv, pp. 170-200. Its probable date appears to be about 
1437. It is discussed shortly by J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the 
Reformation, 1909, pp. 93-9. 

25 Martin Saint-Léon, op. cit., p. 187. The author’s remark is made 
a propos of a ruling of 1270, fixing minimum rates for textile workers 
in Paris. It appears, however, to be unduly optimistic. The fact that 
minimum rates were fixed for textile workers must not be taken as 
evidence that that policy was common, for in England, and probably in 
France, the textile trades received special treatment, and minimum rates 
were fixed for them, while maximum rates were fixed for other, and 
much more numerous, bodies of workers. What is true is that the 
medieval assumption with regard to wages, as with regard to the much 
more important question of prices, was that it was possible to bring 
them into an agreement with an objective standard of equity, which did 
not reflect the mere play of economic forces. 

26 “The Cardinals’ Gospel,” translated from the Carmina Burana by 
G. G. Coulton, in A Medieval Garner, 1910, p. 347. 

27 Printed from the Carmina Burana by S. Gaselee, An Anthology of 
Medieval Latin, 1925, pp. 58-9. 

28 Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of “Romanz ecclesiz filii 
speciales” (Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 1896, vol. ii, p. 66). 

29 For Grosstéte see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. v, pp 


294 NOTES 


404-5 (where he is reported as denouncing the Cahorsines, “whom in our 
time the holy fathers and teachers ... had driven out of France, but 
who have been encouraged and protected by the Pope in England, which 
did not formerly suffer from this pestilence’), and F. S. Stevenson, Rob- 
ert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1899, pp. 101-4. For the bishop of 
London and the Cahorsines see Matthew Paris, Chron. May,, vol. iii, 
pp. 331-2. A useful collection of references on the whole subject is 
given by Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 64-8. 

30 Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham, vol. i, p. 18, July 1279 (trans- 
lated by Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Ref- 
ormation, p. 345). 

81 For cases of clerical usury see Selden Society, vol. v, 1891, Leet 
Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson, p. 35; Hist. MSS. 
Comm., MSS. of the Marquis of Lothian, 1905, p. 26; and Th. Bonnin, 
Regestrum Visitationum Odonis Rigaldi, 1852, p. 35. See also note 88 
(below). 

82 The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at in- 
terest to the citizens of Paris (A. Luchaire, Social France at the time 
of Philip Augustus, translated by E. B. Krehbiel, 1912, p. 130). For the 
bishop’s advice to the usurer see ibid., p. 166. 

83 From a letter of St. Bernard, c.1125, printed by Coulton, A Me- 
dieval Garner, pp. 68-73. 

84 Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, lib. ii, cap. i-vii, where the eco- 
nomic foundations of a State are discussed. 

85 Aquinas, Swuma Theol., 24 2%, Q. Ixxxiii, art. vi. For St. An- 
tonino’s remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, St. Antonino and 
Medieval Economics, p. 59. 

36 Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa xii, Q. i, c. ii, § 1. 

37 A good account of St. Antonino’s theory of property is given by 
Ilgner, Die Volkswirthschafilichen Anschauungen Antonins von Flor- 
eng, chap. x. 

88 “Sed si esset bonus legislator in patria indigente, deberet locare pro 
pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores ...et non tantum eis et familiz 
sustentationem necessariam invenire, sed etiam industriam, peritiam, et 
pericula omnia locare; ergo etiam hoc possunt ipsi in vendendo” (quoted 
Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen PAD ela tas der Scholastik seit 
Thomas v. Aquin, p. 154). 

89 Henry of Ghent, Aurea Quodlibeta, p. yah (quoted Schreiber, op. 
tt. D. 135). 

40 Gratian, Decretum, pt. 1, dist. lxxxvili, cap. xi. 

41 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 24 2®, Q. Ixxvii, art. iv. 

42 Ibid. Trade is unobjectionable, “cum aliquis negotiationi intendit 
propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessarie ad vitam patric 
desint, et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium laboris.” 

43 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emp- 
tionis et venditionis, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, of. cit., p. 197). 

44 See Chap. II, § ii. 

45 Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, A Medieval 
Garner, 1910, pp. 212-15, 208, and Social Life in England from the 
Conquest to the Reformation, 1910, p. 346. 


NOTES ON CHAPTER I 295 


46 The facts are given by Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. 
i, p. 223. For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in ae 
see Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. 
Pp. 173-200. 

47 Bruno Kuske, Quellen zur Geschichte des Kélner Handels und Ver- 
kehrs im Mittelalter, vol. iii, 1923, pp. 197-8. 

48 Karly English Text Society, The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. 
Harris, 1907-13, p. 544. 

49 Wyclif, On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wyclif, 
ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 154-5). The word rendered “loan” is “leeve” 
[ ? leene] in the text. 

50 For examples of such cases see Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. 
Ixiv, nos, 291 and 1089; Bdle. xxxvii, no. 38; Bdle. xlvi, no. 307. They 
are discussed in some detail in my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Dis- 
course upon Usury, 1925, pp. 28-9. 

51 Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, p. 27; Selden Soc., 
Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p. 35. 

52 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 14 28, Q. xcv, art. ii. 

53 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wvyclif, ed. T. 
Arnold, vol. iti, p. 153): “Bot men of lawe and marchauntis and chap- 
men and vitelers synnen more in avarice then done pore laboreres. And 
this token hereof; for now ben thei pore, and now ben thei ful riche, 
for wronges that thei done.” 

54 F.g., Afgidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. i: “Tantum res es- 
timatur juste, quantum ad utilitatem possidentis refertur, et tantum 
juste valet, quantum sine fraude vendi potest. ... Omnis translatio 
facta libera voluntate dominorum juste fit;” Johannes Buridanus, Ques- 
tiones super decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis, v, 23: “Si igitur rem 
suam sic alienat, ipse secundum suam estimationem non damnificatur, sed 
lucratur; igitur non injustum patitur.’ Both writers are discussed by 
Schreiber (op. cit., pp. 161-71 and.177-91). The theory of Buridanus 
appears extraordinarily modern; but he is careful to emphasize that 
prices should be fixed “secundum utilitatem et necessitatem totius com- 

munitatis,” not “penes necessitatem ementis vel vendentis.” 

55 St. Antonino, Summa Theologica, pars ii, tit. i, cap. viii, § I, and 
cap. xvi, § iii. a account of St. Antonino’s theory of prices is given 
by Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Flor- 
enz, chap. iv; Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medieval Economics; and 
Schreiber, of. cit., pp. 217-23. Its interest consists in the attempts to 
maintain the principle of the just price, while making allowance for 
practical necessities. 

56 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emp- 
tionis et venditionis, i, 11, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 198-200). 

57 For these examples see Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the 
City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 259-60; Records of the City of 
Norwich, ed. W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, vol. i, 1906, p. 227; Cal. of 
Early Mayor’s Court Rolls, p. 132; J. M. Wilson, The Worcester Liber 
Albus, 1920, pp. 199-200, 212-13. The question of the legitimacy of rent- 
charges and of the profits of partnership has been fully discussed by 
Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland (1865), and by 


296 NOTES 


Ashley, Economic History. See also G. O’Brien, An Essay on Medieval 
Economic Teaching (1920), and G. G. Coulton, An Episode in Canon 
Law (in History, July 1921), where the difficult question raised by the 
Decretal Naviganti is discussed. 

58 Bernardi Papiensis Summa Decretalium (ed. E. A. D. Laspeyres, 
1860) ; lib. v, tit. xv. 

59 F.g., ALgidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. ii: “Etiam res future 
per tempora non sunt tante estimationis, sicut eaedem collecte in in- 
stanti, nec tantam utilitatem inferunt possidentibus, propter quod oportet, 
quod sint minoris estimationis secundum justitiam.” 

60 O’Brien (op. cit.) appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take this 
view. 

61 Politics, I, iii, ad. fin. 1258. See Who said “Barren Metal’? by 
E. Cannan, W. D. Ross, etc., in Economica, June 1922, pp. 105-7. 

62 Innocent IV, Apparatus, lib. v, De Usurts. 

63 For Italy, see Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i, pp. 179- 
gl, and for France, P. Boissonade, Le Travail dans Europe chrétienne 
au Moyen Age, 1921, pp. 206-9, 212-13. Both emphasize the financial 
relations of the Papacy, 

64 F.g., Council of. Arles, 314; Nicza, 325; Laodicea, 372; and many 
others. 

65 Corpus Juris Canonici, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. 1. 

66 Tbid., cap. ili. 

67 Tbid., Sexti Decretal, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i, il. 

68 Jbid,, Clementinarum, lib. v, tit. v, cap. 1. 

89 The passages referred to in this paragraph are as follows: Corp. 
Jur.~Can., Dectetal., Greg. [X, lib. v, “tits xix,/ cap) Ax; av, syakitipeeore 
Lave AVis 

70 A Formulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, 
ed. H. C. Lea, 1892, Nos. xcii, clxxviii (2), clxxix. 

71 Raimundi de Penna-forti Summa Pastoralis (Ravaisson, Catalogue 
Général des MSS. des Bibliothéques publiques des Departements, 1849, 
vol. i, pp. 592 seqq.). The archdeacon is to inquire: “Whether [the 
priest] feeds his flock, assisting those who are in need and above all 
those who are sick. Works of mercy also are to be suggested by the 
archdeacon, to be done by him for their assistance. If he cannot fully 
accomplish them out of his own resources, he ought, according to his 
power, to use his personal influence to get from others the means of 
carrying them out.... Inquiries concerning the parishioners are to be 
made, both from the priest and from others among them worthy of 
credence, who, if necessary, are to be summoned for the purpose to the 
presence of the archdeacon, as well as from the neighbours, with regard 
to matters which appear to need correction. First, inquiry is to be made 
whether there are notorious usurers, or persons reputed to be usurers, 
and what sort of usury they practise, whether any one, that is to say, 
lends money or anything else . . . on condition that he receive anything 
above the principal, or holds any pledge and takes profits from it in 
excess of the principal, or receives pledges and uses them in the mean- 
time for his own gain; ... whether he holds horses in pledge and 
reckons in the cost of their fodder more than they can eat... or 


NO DES ON CHAPTER I 297 


whether he buys anything at a much lower. price than it is worth, on 
condition that the seller can take it back at a fixed term on paying the 
price, though the buyer knows that he (the seller) will not be able to 
do so; or whether he buys anything for a less price than it is worth, 
because he pays before receiving the article, for example, standing corn; 
or whether any one, as a matter of custom and without express contract, 
is wont to take payment above the principal, as the Cahorsines do... . 
Further, it is to be inquired whether he practises usury cloaked under 
the guise of a partnership (nomine socictatis palliatam), as when a man 
lends money to a merchant, on condition that he be a partner in the 
gains, but not in the losses... . Further, whether he practises usury 
cloaked under the guise of a penalty, that is to say, when his intention 
in imposing a penalty [for non-payment at a given date] is not that he 
may be paid more quickly, but that he may be paid more. Further, 
whether he practises usury in kind, as when a rich man, who has lent 
money, will not receive from a poor man any money above the principal, 
but agrees that he shall work two days in his vineyard, or something 
of the kind. Further, whether he practises usury cloaked by reference to 
a third party, as when a man will not lend himself, but has a friend whom 
he induces to lend. When it has been ascertained how many persons in 
that parish are notorious for usury of this kind, their names are to be 
reduced to writing, and the archdeacon is to proceed against them in 
virtue of his office, causing them to be cited to his court on a day fixed, 
either before himself or his responsible official, even if there is no ac- 
cuser, on the ground that they are accused by common report. If they 
are convicted, either because their offence is evident, or by their own 
confession, or by witnesses, he is to punish them as he thinks best... . 
If they cannot be directly convicted, by reason of their manifold shifts 
and stratagems, nevertheless their ill fame as usurers can easily be es- 
tablished. ... If the archdeacon proceed with caution and diligence 
against their wicked doings, they will hardly be able to hold their own 
or to escape—if, that is . .. he vex them with trouble and expense, and 
humiliate them, by frequently serving citations on them and assigning 
several different days for their trial, so that by trouble, expense, loss 
of time, and all manner of confusion they may be induced to repent and 
submit themselves to the discipline of the Church.” 

72. Marténe and U. Durand, Thesaurus novus Anecdotorum, 1717, 
vol. iv, pp. 696 seqq. 

73 Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, ed. 
C. Babington, 1860, pt. i, chap. iii, pp. 15-16. His words show both the 
difficulties which confronted ecclesiastical teaching and the attempts to 
overcome them. “I preie thee ... seie to me where in Holi Scripture 
is yoven the hundrid parti of the teching upon matrimonie which y 
teche in a book mad upon Matrimonie, and in the firste partie of Cristen 
religioun ... Seie to me also where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hun- 
drid part of the teching which is yoven upon usure in the thridde parti 
of the book yclepid The filling of the wij tables; and yit al thilk hool 
teching yoven upon usure in the now named book is litil ynough or ouer 
litle for to leerne, knowe and have sufficientli into mannis behove and 
into Goddis trewe service and lawe keping what is to be leerned and 


298 NOTES 


kunnen aboute usure, as to reeders and studiers ther yn it muste needis 
be open. Is ther eny more writen of usure in al the Newe Testament 
save this, Luke vi, ‘Geve ye loone, hoping no thing ther of,’ and al that is 
of usure writen in the Oold Testament favourith rather’ usure than it 
reproveth. How evere, therfore, schulde eny man seie that the sufficient 
leernyng and kunnyng of usure or of the vertu contrarie to usure is 
groundid in Holi Scripture? Howe evere schal thilk litil now rehercid 
clausul, Luke vi, be sufficient for to answere and assoile alle the harde 
scrupulose doutis and questiouns which al dai han neede to be assoiled 
in mennis bargenyngis and cheffaringis togidere? Ech man having to do 
with suche questiouns mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth litil or noon 
light thereto at al. Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he 
forbedith usure, and therfore al that mai be take therbi is this, that 
usure is unleeful; but though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful, how 
schal y wite herbi what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it, and 
whanne in a bargeyn is usure, though to summen seemeth noon, and how 
in a bargeyn is noon usure though to summen ther semeth to be ?” 

Pecock’s defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching 
of Scripture was the real answer to the statement afterwards made by 
Luther that the text, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ was an all-suffi- 
cient guide to action (see Chap. II, p. 99). Examples of teaching as to 
usury contained in books such as Pecock had in mind will be found in 
Myrc’s Instructions for Parish Priests (Early English Text Society, 
ed. E. Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, 1902), the Pupilla Oculi, and Dan 
Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt (Early English Text Society, ed. R. Morris, 
1866). 

74 The Catechism of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, 
1552, ed. T. G. Law, 1884, pp. 97-9. Under the seventh commandment 
are denounced: “Fyitlie, al thay that defraudis or spoulyeis the com- 
mon geir, aganis the common weill for lufe of their awin pryvate and 
singulare weill. Saxtlie, all usuraris and ockiraris synnis aganis this 
command, that wil nocht len thair geir frelie, bot makis conditione of 
ockir, aganis the command of Christe. Sevintlie, all thay quhilk hais 
servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair fee or waige, 
accordyng to conditioun and thair deservyng, quilk syn, as sanct James 
sayis, cryis vengeance before God. Auchtlie, all thai that strykis 
cowyne of unlauchful metall, quhair throuch the common weil is hurt 
and skaithit. The nynte, all Merchandis that sellis corruppit and evyll 
stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony uther in bying or sellyng use desait, 
falsate, parjurie, wrang mettis or weychtis, to the skaith of thair nycht- 
bour, thay committ gret syn agane this command. Nother can we clenge 
fra breakyng of this command all kyndis of craftis men quhilk usis nocht 
thair awin craft leillalie and trewlie as thai suld do. . . . All wrechis that 
wyl be ground ryche incontynent, quhay be fraud, falset, and gyle 
twynnis men and thair geir, quhay may keip thair nychbour fra povertie 
and myschance and dois it nocht. Quhay takis ouer sair mail, ouer 
mekle ferme or ony blake maillis fra thair tennands, or puttis thair 
cottaris to ouir sair labouris, quhair throw the tenentis and cottaris is 
put to herschip. Quha invies his nychbouris gud fortune, ouir byis him 
or takis his geir out of his handis with fair hechtis, or prevenis him, 


NOTES ON CHAPTER I 299 


or begyles him at his marchandis hand.” The detail in which different 
forms of commercial sharp practice are denounced is noticeable. 

75 See e.g. Matt. Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. ili, pp. 191-2, for the case of 
a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excommunicate 
usurer, is seized by order of the Count of Brittany and buried alive, 
bound to the dead man. See also Materials for the History of Thomas 
Becket, vol. v, p. 38. 

76 Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. vii, pp. 1017-20; “Anno predicto 
[1485], diebus Mercurii et Jovis predictis, scilicet ante Ramos Pal- 
marum, ibidem apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesie de Vicano; coram 
domino archiepiscopo, et mandato suo, persone infrascripte, parochiani 
de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria pravitate erant quam plurimum dif- 
famati; coram domino propter hoc vocati abjuraverunt: et per mandatum 
domini summas infrascriptas, quas se confessi fuerunt habuisse per 
usurariam pravitatem, per juramentum suum restituere promiserunt, et 
stare juri super his coram eo. Bertrandus de Faveriis abjuratus usuras, 
ut premittitur, promisit restituere centum solidos monete antique: quos, 
prout ipse confessus est, habuerat per usurariam pravitatem. ...” Thir- 
ty-six more cases were treated in this way. 

77 Villani, Cronica, book xii, chap. lviii (ed. 1823, vol. vi, p. 142): 
Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor: “Ma per attignere 
danari, d’ogni piccola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per iniquita contra 
Iddio, o dicesse che usura non fosse peccato mortale, o simili parole, 
condannava in grossa somma di danari, secondo che l’uomo era ricco.” 

78 Constitutions of Clarendon, cap. 15: “Placita de debitis, que fide in- 
terposita debentur, vel absque interpositione fidei, sint in justitia regis.” 
On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 
and ed., 1808, vol. ii, pp. 197-202, and F. Makower, Constitutional His- 
tory of the Church of England, 1895, § 60. 

79 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. 
Thomas, pp. 44, 88, 156, 235; Selden Soc., Borough Customs, ed. M. 
Bateson, vol. ii, 1906, pp. 161 (London) and 209-10 (Dublin) ; Records 
of Leicester, ed. M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1901, p. 49. For similar prohibi- 
tions by manorial courts, see Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of 
Lothian, p. 28, and G. P. Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of 
Castle Combe, 1852, p. 238. 

80 Annales de Burton, p. 256; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. ii, p. 115; Rot. 
Parl., vol. ii, p. 129b. 

81 Cal, of Letter Books of the City of London, ed. R. R. Sharpe, vol. 
H, pp. 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200, 206-7, 261-2, 365; Liber Albus, bk. iti, pt. 1i, 
PP. 77, 315, 394-401, 683; Selden Soc., Leet Jurisdiction in the City of 
Norwich, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Com, MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, pp. 
26, 27. 

82 Rot. Parl., vol. ii, pp. 332a, 350b. 

88 R, H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns, 1894 
(?), p. 190. 

84 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xi, no. 307; Bdle. xxix, nos. 
193-5; Bdle. xxxi, nos. 96-100, 527; Bdle. Ix, no. 20; Bdle. Ixiv, no. 
1089. See also Year Books and Plea Rolls as Sources of Historical In- 


300 NOTES 


formation, by H. G. Richardson, in Trans. Royal Historical Society, 4th 
series, vol. v, 1922, pp. 47-8. 

85 Ed. Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, 2nd ed., 1761, p. 
1026. 

86.10 Ed: [lL st. 1, c.5 7 3-HemaVUl,'c. 5; 11 Hens VIljc. 85 137i 
Caio Peo. VAC Leena 78 

87 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of City of London, ed. A. H. 
Thomas, pp. I, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, 156, 226, 235, 251. The cases 
of the smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In the fifteenth 
century a gild still occasionally tried to enforce its rules by proceedings 
in an ecclesiastical court (see Wm. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and 
Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 1847, nos. xxxvi and Ixviii, where per- 
sons breaking gild rules are cited before the Commissary’s court). 

88 Canterbury and York Soc., Registrum Thome Spofford, ed. A. T. 
Bannister, I919, p. 52 (1424); and Surtees Society, vol. cxxxviii, The 
Register of Thomas of Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York, ed. Wm. 
Brown, 1925, vol. i, pp. 187-8: “6 kal. Maii, 1303. Wilton.’ Littera 
testimonialis super purgacione domini Johannis de Multhorp, vicarii 
ecclesie de Garton’, de usura sibi imposita. Universis Christi fidelibus, ad 
quos presentes littere pervenerint, patéat per easdem quod, cum dominus 
Johannes de Multhorp’, vicarius ecclesie de Garton’, nostre diocesis, 
coram nobis Thoma, Dei gracia, etc., in visitacione nostra super usura 
fuisset notatus, videlicet, quod mutuavit cuidam Jollano de Briddale, ut 
dicebatur, xxxiij s. iiij d., eo pacto quod idem vicarius ab eo reciperet 
per x annos annis singulis x s. pro eisdem, de quibus eciam dictum fuit 
quod prefatus Jollanus dicto vicario pro,octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et 
solvit predicto; eundem vicarium super hoc vocari fecimus coram nobis 
et ei objecimus supradicta, que ipse inficians constancius atque negans se 
optulit in forma juris super hiis legitime purgaturum. Nos autem eidem 
vicario purgacionem suam cum sua sexta manu vicariorum et aliorum 
presbiterorum sui ordinis indiximus faciendam, quam die Veneris proxima 
ante festum apostolorum Philippi et Jacobi (April 26), anno gracie 
m°ccc® tercio, ad hoc sibi prefixo, in manerio nostro de Wilton’ super 
articulo recipimus supradicto, idemque vicarius unacum dominis Johanne, 
rectore ecclesie B.M. juxta portam castri de Eboraco, Johanne et Jo- 
hanne, de Wharrum et de Wyverthorp’ ecclesiarum vicariis ac Roberto, 
Johanne, Alano, Stepheno et Willelmo, de Nafferton’, Driffeld’, Wete- 
wang’, Foston’ et Wintringham ecclesiarum presbiteris parochialibus 
fidedignis, de memorato articulo legitime se purgavit; propter quod ipsum 
vicarium sic purgatum pronunciamus et inmunem sentencialiter declara- 
mus, restituentes eundem ad suam pristinam bonam famam. In cujus 
rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est appensum.” 

89 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xviii, no. 137; Bdle. xix, no. 
21585; Bdle. xxiv, no. 255; Bdle. xxxi, no. 348. See also A. Abram, 
Social England in the Fifteenth Century, 1900, pp. 215-17. In view of 
these examples, it seems probable that a more thorough examination of 
the Early Chancery Proceedings would show that, even in the fifteenth 
century, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in matters of contract 
and usury was of greater practical importance than has sometimes been 
supposed. 


NOTES ON CHAPTER I 301 


90 Surtees Soc., vol. Ixiv, 1875 (Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate 
Church of Ripon) contains more than 100 cases in which the court deals 
with questions of contract, debt, etc. The case which is dismissed “propter 
civilitatem caus” occurs in 1532 (Surtees Soc., vol. xxi, 1845, Ecclesi- 
astical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, p. 49). 

®1 Chetham Soc., vol. xliv, 1901, Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court 
of Whalley, pp. 15-16. 

92 Surtees Soc., vol. Ixiv, 1875, Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate 
Church of Ripon, p. 20. 

93 Hale, op. cit. (note 87 above), no. ccxxxviii. 

ee-ee, Chap: lil; p.16r: 

®5 For parishes, see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv, 
where numerous examples are given. For a gild which appears to have 
acted as a bank, see Hist. MSS. Com., 11th Report, 1887, Appx., pt. iii, 
p. 228 (MSS. of the Borough of King’s Lynn), and for other examples 
of loans, H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Medieval England, 1910, 
pp. 61-3, Records of the City of Oxford, ed. Wm. H. Turner, 1880, p. 8, 
Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. C. Wordsworth, pt. ii, 1897, pp. 616- 
17, and G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908, p. 121. For 
a hospital, see Hist. MSS. Com., 14th Report, Appx., pt. viii, 1895, p. 
129 (MSS. of the Corporation of Bury St. Edmunds), where 20d. is 
lent (or given) to a poor man to buy seed for his land. A statement 
(made half a century after the Dissolution) as to loans by monasteries 
is quoted by F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, 
7th ed., 1920, p. 463; specific examples are not known to me. 

96 W. H. Bliss, Cal. of Papal Letters, vol. i, pp. 267-8. 

®7 For the early history of the Monts de Piété see Holzapfel, Die An- 
finge der Montes Pietatis (1903), and for their development in the Low 
Countries, A. Henne, Histoire du Régne de Charles-quint en Belgique, 
1859, vol. v, pp. 220-3. For proposals to establish them in England see 
S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cx, no. 57 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Eco- 
nomic Documents, vol. iii, sect. ili, no. 6), and my introduction to 
Thomas Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 125-7. 

98 Camden Soc., A Relation of the Island of England about the Year 
1500 (translated from the Italian), 1847, p. 23. 

99 Lyndwood, Provinciale, sub. tit. Usura, and Gibson, Codex Jur. 
Eccl, Angi., vol. ii, p. 1026. 

106 Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, pt. iti, 
chap. iv, pp. 296-7: “Also Crist seide here in this present proces, that 
‘at God’ it is possible a riche man to entre into the kingdom of heuen; 
that is to seie, with grace which God profrith and geueth ... though 
he abide stille riche, and though withoute such grace it is ouer hard to him 
being riche to entre. Wherfore folewith herof openli, that it is not 
forbodun of God eny man to be riche; for thanne noon such man schulde 
euere entre heuen. ... And if it be not forbode eny man to be riche, 
certis thanne it is leeful ynough ech man to be riche; in lasse than he 
vowe the contrarie or that he knowith bi assay and experience him silf 
so miche indisposid anentis richessis, that he schal not mowe rewle him 
silf aright anentis tho richessis: for in thilk caas he is bonde to holde 
him silf in poverte.’ The embarrassing qualification at the end—which 


302 NOTES 


suggests the question, who then dare be rich?—is the more striking 
because of the common-sense rationalism of the rest of the passage. 

101 Trithemius, quoted by J. Janssen, History of the German People at 
the close of the Middle Ages, vol. ii, 1896, p. 102. 

102 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. 
H. Thomas, pp. 157-8. 

103 See A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augustus 
(translated by E. B. Krehbiel), pp. 391-2, where an eloquent denuncia- 
tion by Jacques de Vitry is quoted. 

104 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is a 
surveyor, one Humberstone. ) 

105 See e.g. Chaucer, The Persone’s Tale, §§ 64-6. The parson ex- 
presses the orthodox view that “the condicioun of thraldom and the 
firste cause of thraldom is for sinne.” But he insists that serfs and lords 
are spiritually equal: “Thilke that thou clepest thy thralles been goddes 
peple; for humble folk been Cristes freendes.” 

106 Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa x, Q. ii, c. ili, and causa xii, Q. 
Ce ea ho 

107 Summa Theol., 12 22°, Q. xciv, art. v, § 3. 

108 An article of the German Peasants’ program in 1525 declared: 
“For men to hold us as their own property ... is pitiable enough, con- 
sidering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well 
as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood. 
Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free.” 
(The program is printed in J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the 
Reformation, 1909, pp. 137-42.) The rebels under Ket prayed ‘“‘that all 
bondmen may be made free, for God freed them all with His precious 
blood-shedding” (printed in Bland, Brown, and Tawney, English Eco- 
nomic History, Select Documents, pt. ii, sect. i, no. 8). 


/ 


CHAPTER II 


1A Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge, June 
11, 1895, by Lord Acton, p. 9. 

2\W. Sombart (Der moderne Kapitalismus, 1916, vol. i, pp. 524-6) 
gives facts and figures. See also J. Strieder, Studien zur Geschichte 
kapitalistischer Organisationsformen, 1914, kap. i, ii. 

3F, R. Daenell, Die Bliitezeit der Deutschen Hanse, 1905; Schanz, 
Englische Handelspolitik gegen die Ende des Mittelalters, vol. i; N. S. B. 
Gras, The Early English Customs System, 1918, pp. 452-514, 

4F.g., The Fugger News-Letters, 1568-1605, ed. V. von Klarwill, 
trans. P. de Chary, 1924. 

5 E. Albéri, Le Relasione degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, serie 
I, vol. iii, 1853, p. 357 (Relazione di Filippo II Re di Spagna da Michele 
Soriano nel 1559) : “Questi sono li tesori del re di Spagna, queste le min- 
iere, queste l’Indie che hanno sostentato l’imprese dell’ Imperatore tanti 
anni.” 

6 The best contemporary picture of the trade of Antwerp is that of 
L. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tuttt 1 Paesit Bassi (1567), of which part 
is reprinted in a French translation in Tawney and Power, Tudor Eco- 
nomic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 149-173. The best modern accounts of 
Antwerp are given by Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vol. ii, pp. 399-403, 
and yol. iii, pp. 259-72; Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, vol. ii, pp. 
3-68; and J. A. Goris, Etude sur les Colonies Marchandes Méridionales 
a Anvers de 1488 a 1567 (1925). 

7The Meutings had opened a branch in Antwerp in 1479, the Hoch- 
stetters in 1486, the Fuggers in 1508, the Welsers in 1509 (Pirenne, 
op. cit., vol. iii, p. 261). 

8 Pirenne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 273-6. 

® Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 7-8. 

10 A short account of international financial relations in the sixteenth 
century will be found in my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Discourse 
upon Usury, 1925, pp. 60-86. 

11 Erasmus, Adagia; see also The Complaint of Peace. 

12 For the Fuggers, see Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 85-186, and fot 
the other German firms mentioned, ibid,., pp. 187-260. 

13 See Goris, op. cit., pp. 510-45, where the reply of the Paris theo- 
logians is printed in full; and Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 18, 21. For 
Bellarmin, see Goris, op. cit., pp. 551-2. A curious illustration of the 
manner in which it was still thought necessary in the later sixteenth 
century, and in Protestant England, to reconcile economic policy with 
canonist doctrine, will be found in S.P.D. Eliz., vol. Ixxv, no. 54 
(printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, 
pp. 359-70). The writer, who is urging the repeal of the Act of 1552 

303 


304. NOTES 


forbidding all interest whatever, cites Aquinas and Hostiensis to prove 
that “trewe and unfayned interest” is not to be condemned as usury. 

14 Ashley, Economic History, 1893, vol. 1, pt. ii, pp. 442-3. 

15 Bodin, La Response de Jean Bodin aux Paradoxes de Malestroit 
touchant Venchérissement de toutes choses et le moyen d’y remédier. 

16 See Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, 1865, 
pp. 487 seqq. 

17 Calvin’s views will be found in his Epistole et Responsa, 1575, pp. 
355-7, and in Sermon xxviii in the Opera. 

18 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 

19 Third Decade, 1st and 2nd Sermons, in The Decades of Henry Bull- 
inger (Parker Society), vol. iii, 1850. 

20 Luther, Kleiner Sermon vom Wucher (1519) in Werke (Weimar 
ed.), vol. vi, pp. 1-8; Grosser Sermon vom Wucher (1520), in tbid., 
pp. 33-60; Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher (1524), in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 
279-322; An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen, V ermahnung 
(1540), in ibid., vol. li, pp. 325-424. 

21 “Hie miisste man wahrlich auch den Fuckern und der geistlichen 
Gesellschaft einen Zaum ins Maul legen” (quoted by Ehrenberg, of. cit., 
VOLS) pr dI7m) 3 

22 See pp. 114-15. 

23ZLuther, Wider die riduberischen und morderischen Rotten der 
Bauern (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, pp. 357-61. 

24 Latimer, Sermons; Ponet, An Exhortation, or rather a Warning, to 
the Lords and Commons; Crowley, The Way to Wealth, and Epigrams 
(in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S., 1872) ; 
Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 1895); Becon, 
The Jewel of Joy, 1553; Sandys, 2nd, roth, t1th, and 12th of Sermons 
(Parker Society, 1841); Jewel, Works, pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker So- 
ciety, 1850). Citations from less well-known writers and preachers will 
be found in J. O. W. Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, 1844. 

25 Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. xvi, no. 357. 

26 Bossuet, Traité de l’Usure. For an account of his views, see Favre, 
Le prét a intérét dans lancienne France. 

27 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England with the Mis- 
chiefs attending it, 1673, 

28 For an account of these changes see K. Lamprecht, Zum Verstand- 
niss der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 
14. sum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirth- 
schaftsgeschichte, Bd. i, 1893, pp. I9I seqq. 

29 Lamprecht, of. cit., and J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Ref- 
ormation, 1909, pp. 40-73. 

80 Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 20-39, and Steitden op. cit, (see note 2), pp. 
156-212. 

81 For the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund see Chap. 
I, note 24, and for the Peasants’ Articles, ibid., note 108. 

82 For Geiler von Kaiserberg and Hipler see Schapiro, of. cit., pp. 
30, 126-31. For Hutten see H. Wiskemann, Dartstellung der in Deutsch- 
land zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden Nationaldkonomischen 
Ansichten, 1861, pp. 13-24. 


NOTES-ON CHAPTER II 305 


33 Quoted W. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century, 
1910, p. 28. 

84 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 1912, pp.. 44-52. 

35 Schapiro, op. cit., p. 137. 

86 See citations in Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 47-8, and, for a discussion 
of Luther’s social theory, Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen 
Kirchen, 1912, pp. 549-93. 

87 Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (1520), in 
Werke, vol. vi, pp. 381 seqq. 

88 Schapiro, op. cit., p. 139. 

89 Luther, Ermahnung sum Frieden auf die swilf Artikel der Bauer- 
schaft in Schwaben (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, p. 327. 

40 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, p. 205. 

41 An den christlichen Adel, in ibid., vol. vi, p. 466 (quoted by R. H. 
Murray, Erasmus and Luther, 1920, p. 239). 

42 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 293-4, 312. 

43 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, Luther’s 
Primary Works, 1896, pp. 256-7. 

44 Grosser Sermon vom Wucher, in Werke, vol. vi, p. 49. 

45 See note 73 on Chapter I. 

46 Printed in Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, 
Beilage F, pp. 618-109. 

47 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, op. cit., pp. 
258-9. 

48 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in Werke, vol. xv, p. 302. 

49 Zwingli, Von der gottlichen und menschlichen Gerechtigkeit, oder 
von dem gottlichen Gesetze und den biirgerlichen Gesetzen, printed in 
R. Christoffel, H. Zwingli, Leben und ausgewahlte Schriften, 1857, pt. 
ii, pp. 313 seqg. See also Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 71-4. 

50“Quid si igitur ex negociatione plus lucri percipi possit quam ex 
fundi cuiusvis proventu? Unde vero mercatoris lucrum? Ex ipsius 
inquies, diligentia et industria” (quoted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren 
der Christlichen Kirche, p. 707). 

51 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 

52 Roger. Fenton, 4 Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 61. 

53 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by J. Allen, 1838, 
WOlsii pr tA7e bk. 111, ch. xxili, par..7). 

54 [bid., vol. ii, pp. 128-9 (bk. ili, ch. xxi, par. 7). 

55 Gerrard Winstanley, 4 New-Yeer’s Gift for the Parliament and 
Armie, 1650 (Thomason Tracts, Brit. Mus., E. 587 [6], p. 42). 

56 The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, pt. i, 
TORT De 213: 

57 De Subventione Pauperum. 

58 “Quod ad maiores natu spectat, a nobis quotannis repetitur inspectio 
cuiusque familie. Distribuimus inter nos urbis regiones, ut ordine 
singulas decurias executere liceat. Adest ministro comes unus ex 
senioribus. Illic novi incole examinantur. Qui semel recepti sunt, 
omittuntur; nisi quod requiritur sitne domus pacata et recte composita, 
num lites cum vicinis, num qua ebrietas, num pigri sint et ignari ad 
conciones frequentendas” (quoted by Wiskemann, of. cit., p. 80n.). For 
his condemnation of indiscriminate alms-giving, see zbid., p. 79 n. 


306 NOTES 


59 De non habendo Pauperum Delectu (1523), and De Erogatione 
Eleemosynarum (1524). See K. R. Hagenbach, Johann Oekolampad und 
Oswald Myconius, die Reformatoren Basels, 1859, p. 46. 

60 Carl Pestallozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, Leben wnd ausgewahlie 
Schriften, 1858, pp. 50-1, 122-5, 340-2. 

61 Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 70-4. 

62 Quoted by Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, 1921, 
p. 174. 

63 Calvin, Inst., bk. iv, ch. xii, par. 1. 

64 Printed in Paul Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins, vol. ii, 1838, 
Appx., pp. 26-41. 

65 R. Christoffel, Zwingli, or the Rise of the Reformation in Switzer- 
land, trans. by John Cochran, 1858, pp. 159-60. 

66 Printed in Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, Appx., pp. 23-5. 

67 E, Choisy, L’Etat Chrétien Calviniste & Genéve au temps de Théo- 
dore de Béze, 1902, p. 145. I should like to make acknowledgments to 
this excellent book for most of the matter contained in the following 
paragraphs. 

68 Paul Henry, op. cit., pp. 70-5. Other examples are given by Pre- 
served Smith, op. cit., pp. 170-4, and by F. W. Kampschulte, Johann 
Calvin, seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf, 1869. Statistical esti- 
mates of the bloodthirstiness of Calvin’s régime vary; Smith (p. 171) 
states that in Geneva, a town of 16,000 inhabitants, 58 persons were 
executed and 76 banished in the years 1542-6. 

69 Knox, quoted by Preserved Smith, op. cit., p. 174. 

70 Calvin, Jnst., bk. iii, ch. vii, par. 5. 

71 Choisy, op. cit., pp. 442-3. 

72 Ibid., pp. 35-37. 

73 Tbid., pp. 189, 117-19. 

74 Ibid., pp. 35, 165-7. 

75 [bid., pp. 119-21. 

76 Ibid., pp. 189-94. 

17 Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 70n. 

78 See the description ae the Giech given in Calvin, Inst., bk. iv, ch. i, 
par. 4: “Quia nunc de ecclesia visibili disserere propositum est, discamus 
vel matris elogio, quam utilis sit nobis eius cognitio, immo necessaria, 
quando non alius est in vitam ingressus nisi nos ipsa concipiat in utero, 
nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique sub custodia et guber- 
-natione sua nos tueatur, donec excuti carne mortali, similes erimus 
angelis. Neque enim patitur nostra infirmitas a schola nos dimitti, 
donec toto vite cursu discipuli fuerimus. Adde quod extra eius gremium 
nulla est speranda peccatorum remissio nec ulla salus.” 

79 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata: Or the Acts, Decisions, 
Decrees and Canons of those famous National Councils of the Reformed 
Churches in France, 1692, vol. i, p. 99. 

80 [bid., vol. i, p. 9 (pirates and ny Bocce tradesmen), pp. 25, 34, 38, 
79, 140, 149 (interest and usury), p. 70 (false merchandize and selling 
of stretched cloth), p. 99 (reasonable profits), pp. 162, 204 (investment 
of money for the benefit of the poor), pp. 194, 213 (lotteries). 


NOTES ON CHAPTER II 307 


81 The Buke of Discipline, in Works of John Knox, ed. D. Laing, vol. 
ii, 1848, p. 227. 

82 Scottish History Soc., St. Andrews Kirk Session Register, ed. D. H. 
Fleming, 1889-90, vol. i, p. 309; vol. ii, p. 822. 

83 W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1890, 
vol. i, p. 11. The words are Governor Bradford’s. 

84 Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,’ 1630-49, ed. J. K. 
Hosmer, 1908, vol. i, pp. 134, 325; vol. ii, p. 20. ; 

85 Weeden, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 125, 58. 

86 Winthrop, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 20. 

87 J. A. Doyle, The English in America, vol. ii, 1887, p. 57; the price 
of cattle “must not be judged by urgent necessity, but by reasonable 
profit.” 

88 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644, chap. lv. 

89 Winthrop, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 315-18. A similar set of rules as to 
the conduct of the Christian in trade are given by Bunyan in The Life 
and Death of Mr. Badman, 1905 ed., pp. 118-22. 

90 T owe this phrase to the excellent book of J. T. Adams, The Found- 
ang of New England. 


CHAPTER III 


1J. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglie (ed. T. Hearne). 

2.4 Hen; VI, c:-10;°6 Hens VEIL cise 7 Hens V IN crs 25 eee 
VIII, c. 13. For the Commission of 1517 see Leadam, The Domesday 
of Enclosures. 

3 For examples see J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reforma- 
tion, pp. 60-1, 65, 67, 70-1. 

4More, Utopia, p. 32 (Pitt Press ed., 1879): “Noblemen and gentle- 
men, yea and certeyne abbottes, holy men no doubt . . . leave no grounde 
for tillage, thei enclose al into pastures.” For a case of claiming a 
bondman see Selden Society, vol. xvi, 1903, Select Cases in the Court 
of Star Chamber, pp. cxxiii-cxxix, 118-29 (Carter uv, the Abbott of 
Malmesbury) ; for conversion of copyholds to tenancies at will, Selden 
Society, vol. xii, 1898, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. lix-Ixv, 
64-101 (Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot’s Ripton v. St. John; the 
change was alleged to have been made in 1471). 

5A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution 
(Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradoff, vol. i, 
1909, p. 100), estimates the net temporal income of English monasteries 
in 1535 at £109,736, and the net income from all sources at £136,361. 
These figures require to be multiplied by at least 12 to convert them 
into terms of modern money. An estimate of the capital value which 
they represent can only be a guess, but it can hardly have been less 
(in terms of modern money) than £20,000,000. ; 

6 For the status and payments of grantees, see the figures of Savine, 
printed in H. A. L. Fisher, The Political History of England, 1485-1547, 
Appx. ii: the low price paid by peers is particularly striking. The best 
study is that of S. B. Liljegren, The Fall of the Monasteries and the 
Social Changes in England leading up to the Great Revolution (1924), 
which shows in detail (pp. 118-25) the activities of speculators. 

7 Star Chamber Proc., Hen. VIII, vol. vi, no. 181, printed in Tawney 
and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, pp. 19-29. 

8 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. lviii-lxix, 
198-200. 

® Quoted by F. A. Gasquet, Henry the Eighth and the English Monas- 
teries, 1920, pp. 227-8. 

10 See, e.g., The Obedience of a Christian Man (in Tyndale’s Doc- 
trinal Treatises, Parker Society, 1848), p. 231, where the treatment of 
the poor by the early Church is cited as an example; and Policies to 
reduce this Realme of Englande unto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate, 
1549 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 
ili, pp. 311-45): “Like as we suffered our selfes to be ignorant of the 
trewe worshipping of God, even so God kepte from us the right knowl- 
edge how to reforme those inconveniences which we did see before our 
eyes to tende unto the utter Desolation of the Realme. But now the 

308 


NOTES ON CHAPTER III 309 


the trew worshepping of Gode is . . . so purely and sincerely sett forthe, 
it is likewise to be trusted that God... will use the kinges maiestie 
and your grace to be also his ministres in plucking up by the roots all 
the cawses and occasions of this foresaid Decaye and Desolation.” 

11 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 

12 A, F, Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, 1915, p. 331. He 
goes on: “The contrasts between one grammar school to every 5,625 
people, and that presented by the Schools Inquiry Report in 1864 of one 
to every 23,750 people .. . is not to the disadvantage of our pre-Refor- 
mation ancestors.” For details of the Edwardian spoliation, see the 
same author’s English Schools at the Reformation, 1546-8 (1806). 

13 See Acts of the Privy Council, vol. ii, pp. 193-5 (1548) ; in response 
to protests from the members for Lynn and Coventry, the gild lands of 
those cities are regranted to them. 

14 Crowley, The Way to Wealth, in Select Works of Robert Crowley, 
ed. J. M. Cowper (Early English Text Society, 1872, pp. 129-150). 

15 Crowley, op. cit., and Epigrams (in ibid., pp. 1-51). 

16 Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 1553: “They abhore the names of Monkes, 
Friers, Chanons, Nonnes, etc., but their goodes they gredely gripe. And 
yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a reson- 
able price, norished scholes, brought up youth in good letters, they do 
none of all these thynges.” 

17'Thomas Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 
1895), p. 32. The same charge is repeated in subsequent sermons. 

18, W. Russell, Keti’s Rebellion in Norfolk, 1859, p. 202. For 
Somerset’s policy and the revolt of the gentry against it, see Tawney, 
The Agrarian Problem in the Stxteenth Century, pp. 365-70. 

19 Latimer, Seven Sermons before Edward VI (English Reprints, ed. 
E. Arber, 1895), pp. 84-6. 

20 Pleasure and Pain, in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. 
Cowper, p. 116. 

21 The Way to Wealth, in tbid., p. 132. 

22 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. 

23 4 Prayer for Landlords, from A Book of Private Prayer set forth 
by Order of King Edward VI, 

24 Bacon, Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain. 

25 For a discussion of the problem of credit as it affected the peasant 
and small master, see my introduction to Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 
1925, PP. 17-30. 

26 See note 71 on Chapter I. 

27 D’Ewes, Journals, 1682, p. 173. 

28 Calendar S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi, nos. I9, 20. 

29 For examples see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv. 
The best account of parish business and organization is given by S. L. 
Ware, The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects, 
1908. 

80 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. See also Harrison, The Description of 
Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. xviii. 

81,4 Godlie Treatise concerning the Lawful Use of Riches, a trans- 
lation by Thos. Rogers from the Latin of Nicholas Heming, 1578, p. 8 


310 NOTES 


82 Sandys, 2nd, 1oth, 11th, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 
1841) ; Jewel, Works, pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850); Thos. 
Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, 1572; Miles Mosse, The Arraignment 
and Conviction of Usurie, 1595; John Blaxton, The English Usurer, or 
Usury Condemned by the Most Learned and Famous Divines of the 
Church of England, 1634. 

33 Heming, op. cit., pp. 16-17. 

84 Roger Fenton, 4 Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 59. 

85 Wilson, op. cit., 1925 ed., p. 281. 

36 Miles Mosse, op, cit. 

87S. P.D, Eliz., vol. Ixxv, no. 54. (Printed in Tawney and Power, 
Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iti, pp. 359-70). 

38 Heming, op. cit., p. II. 

39 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 1901. 

40 Quoted by Maitland, op. cit., pp. 49-50. 

41 Wilson, op. cit. 

42 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 1660, bk. iii, ch. iii, par. 30. 

43 Mosse, op. cit., Dedication, p. 6. 

44. Cardwell, Synodalia, 1842, p. 436. 

45 Cardwell, The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws, 1850, pp. 
206, 323. 

46 The Remains of Archbishop Grindal, ed. Wm. Nicholson (Parker 
Soc., 1843), p. 143. 

47 See, e.g., W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 
1924, vol. iii, p. 180 (Archdeacon Mullins’ Articles for the Archdeaconry 
of London (1585): “Item, whether you do know that within your parish 
there is (or are) any person or persons notoriously known or suspected 
by probable tokens or common fame to be an usurer; or doth offend by 
any colour or means directly or indirectly in the same”), and pp. 184, 
233; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv, pp. 319, 337, 416. 

48 Cardwell, Synodalia, vol. i, pp. 144, 308; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv, 
p. 500. 

49 Ware, op. cit. (see note 29 above), quotes several examples. See 
also Arche@ologia Cantiana, vol. xxv, 1902, pp. 27, 48 (Visitations of 
the Archdeacon of Canterbury). 

50 Hist. MSS. Com., 13th Report, 1892, Appx., pt. iv, pp. 333-4 (MSS. 
of the Borough of Hereford). 

51 W. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal 
Causes, 1847, p. 166. 

52 Yorkshire Arch. Journal, vol. xviii, 1895, p. 331. 

53 Commissary of London Correction Books, 1618-1625 (H. 184, pp. 
164, 192). I am indebted to Mr. Fincham of Somerset House (where 
the books are kept) for kindly calling my attention to these cases. The 
shorter of them (p. 192) runs as follows: 


Ranceneeentoni Detected for an usurer that taketh above the 
rate of x/i in the 100! and above the rate of 2s. 

extra Aldersgate : ’ 

Thomas Witham in the pound for money by him lent for a yeare, 

or more than after that rate for a lesse tyme 

ex fama prout in rotula. Quo die comparuit, 

etc. 


at the signe of 
the Unicorne 


NOTES ON CHAPTER III 311 


gmo Maii 1620 coram domino officiali principali etc. et in eius camera 
etc. comparuit dictus Witham et ei objecto ut supra allegavit that he 
is seldom at home himselfe but leaves his man to deale in the business 
of his shop, and yf any fault be committed he saith the fault is in his 
man and not in himselfe, and he sayeth he will give charge and take 
care that no oppression shall be made nor offence committed this way 
hereafter, humbly praying the judge for favour to be dismissed, unde 
dominus monuit eum that thereafter neither by himselfe nor his servant 
he offende in the lyke nor suffer any such oppression to be committed, 
et cum hac monitione eum dimisit. 

54.9 PD. Eliz., vol. ixxv, no. 54. 

55 For an account of these expedients see my introduction to Wilson’s 
Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 123-8. 

56 Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy, bk. viii, chap. i, 
par: 5. 

57 Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xxvii, 1597, p. 129. 

58 The Stiffkey Papers (ed. H. W. Saunders, Royal Historical Society, 
Camden Third Series, vol. xxvi, 1915), p. 140. 

59 Quoted by E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor 
Relief, 1900, p. 148. 

60 For an account of the treatment of exchange business under Eliza- 
beth, see Wilson, of. cit., Introduction, pp. 146-54. 

81 For references see ibid., pp. 164-5; and Les Reportes del Cases in 
Camera Stellata, 1593-1609, ed. W. P. Baildon, 1804, pp. 235-7. The 
latter book contains several instances of intervention by the Star Cham- 
ber in cases of engrossing of corn (pp. 71, 76-7, 78-9, 91) and of en- 
closure and depopulation (pp. 49-52, 164-5, 192-3, 247, 346-7). 

82 4 Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed. 
E. Lamond, 1893, p. 14. 

63 The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. i, 1847, p. 6. 

64 Thid., p. 64. 

85 Tbid., pp. 80, 138. 

66 Tbid., p. 167. 

87 [bid., pp. 28-0. 

68 Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 166-7. For the 
activity of the Government from 1629 to 1640, see Tawney, The Agrarian 
Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 391, and E. M. Leonard, 
The Inclosure of Common Fields in the Seventeenth Century, in Trans. 
Royal Hist. Soc., N.S., vol. xix, pp. I01 seqq. 

69 Letter to Dr. Gilbert Sheldon, Warden of All Souls (in Laud’s 
Works, vol. vi, pt. ii, p. 520): “One thing more I must tell you, that, 
though I did you this favour, to make stay of the hearing till your 
return, yet for the business itself, I can show you none; partly because 
I am a great hater of depopulations in any kind, as being one of the 
greatest mischiefs in this kingdom, and of very ill example from a 
college, or college tenant”; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. i, 
par. 204. 

70 $.P.D. Chas. I, vol. ceccexcix, no. 10 (printed in Tawney, The 
Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 420-1); and Lords’ 
Journals, vol. vi, p. 468b (March 13, 1643-4), Articles against Laud: 
“Then Mr. Talbot upon oath deposed how the Archbishop did oppose 


302 NOTES 


the law in the business of inclosures and depopulations; how, when the 
law was desired to be pleaded for the right of land, he bid them ‘Go 
plead law in inferior Courts, they should not plead it before him’; and 
that the Archbishop did fine him for that business two hundred pounds 
for using the property of his freehold, and would not suffer the law to 
be pleaded.” 

71 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 150-64; 
Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen- 
turies, 1904, pp. 142-7. 

72 R, R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North, 1921, pp. 412, 413 n. 

73 Camden Soc., N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Cases in the Courts of Star 
Chamber and High Commission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, p. 46. For another 
case of engrossing of corn, see ibid., pp. 82-9. 

74 Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of 
the Peace, in Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, 
Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 551-4; Leonard, op. cit., p. 157. 

7 The Works of William Laud, ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, 1857, pt. i, 
p. 191. (Answer to Lord Save and Sele’s speech upon the Bill about 
Bishops’ Powers in Civil Affairs and Courts of Judicature.) 

76 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 5-6. 

77 Harrington, Works, 1700 ed., pp. 69 (Oceana) and 388-9 (The Art 
of Law-giving). 

78 G. Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 1622. The same simile had been used 
much earlier in A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of 
England, ed. E. Lamond, p. 98. 

79 D’Ewes, Journals, p. 674; and 39 Eliz., c. 2. 

80 For criticisms of price control see Tawney and Power, Tudor 
Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 339-41, and vol. ii, p. 188, and Stiffkey 
Papers (see note 58 above), pp. 130-40. 

81H. Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. ii, 1827, letter clxxxii, 
and J. W. Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 1839, 
VOI; si, Dp. 343. 

82 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 249. 

83 Commons’ Journals, May 21, 1604, vol. i, p. 218. 

8413 Eliz. c. 8, repealing 5 and 6 Ed. VI, c. 20; D’Ewes, Journals, 
pp. I7I-4. 

85 Qwen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 1825, vol. ii, pp. 
304n., 412. 

86 Hist. MSS. Com., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 
1901, p. 46 (MSS. of Corporation of Burford). 

87 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 233. 

88 Coke, Institutes, pt. ii, 1797, pp. 601 seqqg. (Certain articles of abuses 
which are desired to be reformed in granting of prohibitions, exhibited 
by Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury.) 

89 Thomas Ridley, A View of the Civile and Ecclesiastical Law, and 
wherein the Practice of them is streitened and may be relieved within 
this Land, 1607, Dedication, p. 3. 

80 W. Huntley, A Breviate of the Prelates’ intolerable Usurpation, 1637, 
pp. 183-4. The case referred to is that of Hinde, alleged to have been 
heard Mich, 18 and 19 Eliz. For the controversy over prohibitions, see 


NOTES ON CHAPTER III 313 


R. G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the.High Commission, 1913, pp. 
180 seqq. 

91 D’Ewes, Journals, pp. 171, 173. 

92 See, e.g., Surtees Society, vol. xxxiv, 1858, The Acts of the High 
Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham, Preface, which shows 
that between 1626 and 1639 cases of contempt of the ordinary ecclesiasti- 
cal jurisdiction ran into hundreds. 

93 Penn, No Cross, No Crown, pt. i, ch. xii, par. 8. 

94 Sanderson, De Obligatione Conscientie, 1666; Taylor, The Rule and 
Exercises of Holy Living, 1650, chap. iii, sect. iii (Of Negotiation or 
Civil Contracts, Rules and Measures of Justice in Bargaining). 

95 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 1924, pp. 193, 
194. Similar sentiments with regard to the necessity of poverty were 
expressed later by the Rev. J. Townsend, in his Dissertation on the 
Poor Laws (1785), and by Patrick Colquhoun in his Treatise on the 
Wealth and Resources of the British Empire (1814). Like Mandeville, 
both these writers argue that poverty is essential to the prosperity, and, 
indeed, to the very existence, of civilization. For a full collection of 
citations to the same effect from eighteenth-century writers, see E. S. 
Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, 
chaps. iv-vi. 

96 The Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar Way 
for the Use of All, 1658. 


CHAPTER IV 


1 Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which 
respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to Trade, 1750, 
p. 33. The best account of Tucker, most of whose works are scarce, 
is given by W. E. Clark, Josiah Tucker, Economist (Studies in History, 
Economics and Public Law, Columbia University, vol. xix, 1903-5). 

2 Reliquie Baxteriane: or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the 
most memorable Passages of his Life and Times, 1696, p. 5. 

3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

4The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of New~ 
castle (Everyman ed., 1915, p. 153). 

5 Baxter, op. cit., p. 31. 

6 Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress. 

7 Baxter, op. cit., p. 80. 

8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, 1884 ed., p. 122. 

9 Quoted S. Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii, 1823, p. 314. 

10R, G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, vol. i, 1910, 
pp. 249-50. 

11 Baxter, op. cit., p. 30. 

12 An orderly and plaine Narration of the Beginnings and Causes of 
this Warre, 1644, p. 4 (Brit. Mus., Thomason Tracts, E. 54 [3]). I 
owe this reference to the kindness of Father Paschal Larkin. 

13 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. vi, par. 271. 

14 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1670, Preface, p. xxxix. 

15 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, 1827 
ed., vol. iii, p. IOI. 

16D, C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, 1886, vol. i, pp. 
20-1. In 1640 the Root and Branch Petition included, among the evils 
due to the Bishops, “the discouragement and destruction of all good 
subjects, of whom are multitudes, both clothiers, merchants and others, 
who, being deprived of their ministers, and overburthened with these 
pressures, have departed the kingdom to Holland and other parts, and 
have drawn with them a great manufacture of cloth and trading out of 
the land into other places where they reside, whereby wool, the great 
staple of the kingdom, is become of small value, and vends not, trading 
is decayed, many poor people want work, seamen lose employment, and 
the whole land is much impoverished” (S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional 
Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 [1889], p. 73). For in- 
stances of the comparatively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under 
Elizabeth, see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, 
section vi, nos. 3, 4, II (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth of English 
Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt. i, pp. 79-84. 

17 Toryism and Trade can never agree, 1713, p. 12. The tract is 


314 


NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 315 


wrongly ascribed to Davenant by’ H. Levy, Economic Liberalism, 1913, 
p. 12. 

18 See, e¢.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le régne de Louis 
XIV, 1899, chap. xvii, where the reports of several intendants are 
quoted; and Levasseur, Histoire du commerce de la France, 1911, vol. i, 
p. 421. 

19.4 Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the 
Country about the Odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 20. 

20 Sir Wm. Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the 
Netherlands, chap. v, vi. 

21 The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland 
and West-Friesland, i702, pt. i, chap. xiv. 

22 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp. 25-6. 

23 The Present Interest of England stated, by a Lover of his King and 
Country, 1671. I am indebted to Mr. A. P. Wadsworth for calling my 
attention to the passage quoted in the text. The same point is put 
more specifically by Lawrence Braddon: “The superstition of their re- 
ligion obligeth France to keep (at least) fifty Holy days more than we 
are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work is done is 
one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the deluded people” 
(Abstract of the Draft of a Bill for relieving, reforming and employing 
the Poor, 1717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry into Occasional Con- 
formity, 1702, pp. 18-19: “We wonder, gentlemen, you will accept our 
money on your deficient funds, our stocks to help carry on your wars, 
our loans and credits to your victualling office and navy office. If you 
would go on to distinguish us, get a law made we shall buy no lands, 
that we may not be freeholders; and see if you could find money to 
buy us out. Transplant us into towns and bodies, and let us trade by 
our selves; let us card, spin, knit, weave and work with and for one 
another, and see how you'll maintain your own poor without us. Let 
us fraight our ships apart, keep our money out of your Bank, accept 
none of our bills, and separate your selves as absolutely from us in 
civil matters, as we do from you in religious, and see how you can go 
on without us.” 

24 Swift, Examiner. 

25 Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, 1753, p. 21. 

26 Reliquie Baxteriane (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: “The gen- 
erality of the Master Workmen [i.e., employers] lived but a little better 
than their journeymen (from pond to mouth) but only that they 
laboured not altogether so hard.” 

27 Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, no. x, and Montesquieu, Esprit des 
Lois, xix, 27, and xx, 22. See also the remarks to the same effect in 
D’Argenson, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France, 1765. 

28 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673. 

29 Marston, Eastward Ho!, act I, sc. i. 

30 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. 1, par. 163. 

31 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23 

82 Max- Weber, Die protestantische Bihik und der Geist dest Kapi- 
talismus, first published in the Archiv fiir Sosialz vissenschaft und Sozial- 
politik Statistik, vols. xx, xxi, and since reprinted in vol. i of his 


316 NOTES 


Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Religionssoziologie, 1920; Troeltsch, Die 
Soztallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress, 
1912; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Fret- 
handel, 1906; Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 1914, 
chap. v. 

Weber’s essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany. Its main 
thesis—that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from 
which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of pre- 
ponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favor- 
able to the growth of capitalist enterprise—appears to be accepted by 
Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, pp. 704 seqq. It 
is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfdnge des mo- 
dernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57), who dissents from many of 
Weber’s conclusions. Weber’s essay is certainly one of the most fruit- 
ful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory 
which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it, 
in particular with reference to its discussion of the economic applica- 
tion given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by the word 
“calling.” At the same time, there are several points on which Weber’s 
arguments appear to me to be one-sided and overstrained, and on which 
Brentano’s criticisms of it seem to me to be sound. 

Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable in an essay dealing with economic 
and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and social 
organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to moral and 
intellectual influences developments which have their principal expiana- 
tion in another region altogether. There was plenty of the “capitalist 
spirit” in fifteenth-century Venice and Florence, or in south Germany 
and Flanders, for the simple reason that these areas were the greatest 
commercial and financial centers of the age, though all were, at least 
nominally, Catholic. The development of capitalism in Holland and 
England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due, not to the 
fact that they were Protestant powers, but to large economic movements, 
in particular the Discoveries and the results which flowed from them. 
Of course material and psychological changes went together, and of 
course the second reacted on the first. But it seems a little artificial to 
talk as though capitalist enterprise could not appear till religious changes 
had produced a capitalist spirit. It would be equally true, and equally 
one-sided, to say that the religious changes were purely the result of 
economic movements. 

(ii) Weber ignores, or at least touches too lightly on, intellectual 
movements, which were favorable to the growth of business enterprise 
and to an individualist attitude towards economic relations, but which 
had little to do with religion. The political thought of the Renaissance 
was one; as Brentano points out, Machiavelli was at least as powerful 
a solvent of traditional ethical restraints as Calvin. The speculations 
of business men and economists on money, prices and the foreign ex- 
changes were a second. Both contributed to the temper of single- 
minded concentration on pecuniary gain, which Weber understands by 
the capitalist spirit. 

(111) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself. In the 


NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 317 


first place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the seven- 
teenth century the conception of social ethics held by Calvin and his 
immediate followers. In the second place, he speaks as though all 
English Puritans in the seventeenth century held much the same view 
of social duties and expediency. Both suggestions are misleading. On 
the one hand, the Calvinists of the sixteenth century (including English 
Puritans) were believers in a rigorous discipline, and the individualism 
ascribed not unjustly to the Puritan movement in its later phases would 
have horrified them. The really significant question is that of the causes 
of the change from the one standpoint to the other, a question which 
Weber appears to ignore. On the other hand, there were within seven- 
teenth-century Puritanism a variety of elements, which held widely dif- 
ferent views as to social policy. As Cromwell discovered, there was no 
formula which would gather Puritan aristocrats and Levellers, land- 
owners and Diggers, merchants and artisans, buff-coat and his general, 
into the fold of a single social theory. The issue between divergent 
doctrines was fought out within the Puritan movement itself. Some 
won; others lost. 

Both “the capitalist spirit” and “Protestant ethics,” therefore, were 
a good deal more complex than Weber seems to imply. What is true 
and valuable in his essay is his insistence that the commercial classes 
in seventeenth-century England were the standard-bearers of a par- 
ticular conception of social expediency, which was markedly different 
from that of the more conservative elements in society—the peasants, 
the craftsmen, and many landed gentry—and that that conception found 
expression in religion, in politics, and, not least, in social and economic 
conduct and policy. 

83 Cunningham, The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment 
of Money and the Use of Wealth, 1900, p. 25. 

34 Knox, The Buke of Discipline, in Works, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 
1848, pp. 183 seqg.; Thos. Cartwright, A Directory of Church Govern- 
ment (printed in D. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1822, vol. v, Appx. 
iv); W. Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Dis- 
cipline, 1574; J. Udall, A Demonstration of the Trueth of that Discipline 
which Christe hath prescribed in his Worde for the Government of his 
Church, 1589; Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings published 
and practised within this Iland of Brytaine under Pretence of Reforma- 
tion and for the Presbyteriall Discipline, 1593 (part reprinted in R. G. 
Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 
as illustrated by the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1905). 

35 Cartwright, op. cit. 

36 Usher, op. cit., p. I. 

87 Ibid., pp. 14-15, for Bancroft’s account of the procedure. 

88 Quoted from Baillie’s Letters by W. A. Shaw, A History of the 
English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 
1900, vol. i, p. 128. ; 

89 Shaw, op. cit., vol. ii, chap. iii (The Presbyterian System, 1646-60). 
For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline, see Chetham So- 
ciety, vols. xx, xxii, xxiv, Minutes of the Manchester Classis, and vols. 
xxxvi, xli, Minutes of the Bury Classis. 


318 NOTES 


40 See Chap. III, p. 142. 

41 Pyritan Manifestoes, p. 120, quoted by H. G. Wood, The Influence 
of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property, in Prop- 
erty, its Rights and Duties, 1913, p. 142. Mr. Wood’s essay contains an 
excellent discussion of the whole subject, and I should like here to 
acknowledge my obligations to it. For the views of Knewstub, Smith, 
and Baro, see the quotations from them printed by Haweis, Sketches of 
the Reformation, 1844, pp. 237-40, 243-6. It should be noted that Baro, 
while condemning those who, “sitting idle at home, make merchandise 
only of their money, by giving it out in this sort to needy persons... 
without having any regard of his commodity to whome they give it, 
but only of their own gain,” nevertheless admitted that interest was 
not always to be condemned. See also Thos. Fuller, History of the 
University of Cambridge, ed. M. Prickett and T. Wright, 1840, pp. 
275-6, 288-9, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Com- 
merce, Modern Times, 1921 ed., pt. i, pp. 157-8. 

42 New Shakespeare Society, Series vi, no. 6, 1877-9, Phillip Stubbes’s 
Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed. F. J. Furnivall, pp. 115-16. 

43 W. Ames, De Conscientia et eius iure vel casibus libri quinque, bk. 
v, chaps. xliii, xliv. Ames (1576-1633) was educated at Christ’s Col- 
lege, Cambridge, tried to settle at Colchester, but was forbidden to 
preach by the Bishop of London, went to Leyden about 1610, was 
appointed to the theological chair at Franeker in 1622, where he re- 
mained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam. 


44 F.g., Stubbes, op. cit.; Richard Capel, Temptations, their Nature, 


Danger, Cure, 1633; John Moore, The Crying Sin of England of not 
caring for the Poor; wherein Inclosure, vig. such as doth unpeople 
Townes, and uncorn Fields, is arraigned, convicted and condemned, 1653. 

45J. O. Halliwell, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir 
Simonds D’Ewes, 1845, vol. i, pp. 206-10, 322, 354; vol. ii, pp. 96, 153-4. 

46 Usher, op. cit. (see note 34 above), pp. 32, 53, 70, 99-100. 

47 Sept. 26, 1645, it is resolved “that it shall be in the power of the 
eldership to suspend from the sacrament of the Lord’s supper any 
person that shall be legally attainted of Barratry, Forgery, Extortion, 
Perjury, or Bribery” (Commons’ Journals, vol. iv, p. 290). 

48 Chetham Society, Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, 
1647-57, pt. i, pp. 32-3. The Cambridge classis (ibid., pt. ii, pp. 196-7) 
decided in 1657 that the ordinance of Parliament of August 29, 1648 
should be taken as the rule of the classis in the matter of scandal. The 
various scandals mentioned in the ordinance included extortion, and the 
classis decided that “no person lawfully convict of any of the fore- 
said scandalls bee admitted to the Lord’s supper without signification of 
sincere repentance,” but it appears (p. 198) to have been mainly inter- 
ested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers. 

49 Hist. MSS. Comm., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 
IQOI, p. 132. 


50 Quoted by F. J. Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baster,. 


1924, p. 92. 
51 Selections from those parts of The Christian Directory which bear 
on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawney, Chapters from Richard 


a ee, i 


NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 31gs 


Baxter's Christian Directory, 1925, in which most of the passages quoted 
in the text will be found. 

52 Reliquie Baxteriane (see note 2), p. I. 

53 Jife and Death of Mr. Badman (Cambridge English Classics, 1905), 
pp. 116-25, where Bunyan discusses at length the ethics of prices. 

54 Carlyle, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Letter ii. 

55 See on these points Weber, op. cit. (note 32 above), p. 94, whose 
main conclusions I paraphrase. 

56 Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1692 ed.), p. xvii. 

57 See, e.g., Thos. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, Preface, 1925 ed., 
p. 178: “There bee two sortes of men that are alwayes to bee looked 
upon very narrowly, the one is the dissemblinge gospeller, and the other 
is the wilfull and indurate papiste. The first under colour of religion 
overthroweth all religion, and bearing good men in hande that he loveth 
playnesse, useth covertelie all deceypte that maye bee, and for pryvate 
gayne undoeth the common welfare of man. And touching thys sinne 
of usurie, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these 
counterfeite professours of thys pure religion.” 

58 Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, pp. 60-1. 

59 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673. 

60S. Richardson, The Cause of the Poor Pleaded, 1653, Thomason 
Tracts, E. 703 (9), p. 14. For other references, see note 72 below. 
For extortionate prices, see Thomason Tracts, E. 399 (6), The Worth 
of a Penny, or a Caution to keep Money, 1647. I am indebted for this 
and subsequent references to the Thomason Tracts to Miss P. James. 

61 Hooker, Preface to The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman 
ed., 1907, vol. i, p. 128. 

62 Wilson, op. cit., p. 250. 

63 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his Widow 
Lucy, Everyman ed., 1908, pp. 64-5. 

64 See the references given in note 66. 

65 The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Despatches, by William 
Knowler, D.D., 1739, vol. ii, p. 138. 

66 No attempt has been made in the text to do more than refer to the 
points on which the economic interests and outlook of the commercial 
and propertied classes brought them into collision with the monarchy, 
and only the most obvious sources of information are mentioned here. 
For patents and monopolies, including the hated soap monopoly, see 
G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908, chap. xvii, and 
W. Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly, 1906, chap. xi, and 
passim. For the control of exchange business, Cambium Regis, or the 
Office of his Majesties Exchange Royall, declaring and justifying hs 
Majesties Right and the Convenience thereof, 1628, and Ruding, Annals 
of the Coinage, 1819, vol. iv, pp. 201-10. For the punishment of specu- 
lation by the Star Chamber, and for projects of public granaries, 
Camden Society, N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Reports of Cases in the Courts 
of Star Chamber and High Commission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, pp. 43 seqq., 
82 seqq., and N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 
1915, pp. 246-50. For the control of the textile industry and the reaction 
against it, H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 


320 NOTES 


1920, chaps. iv, vii; Kate E. Barford, The West of England Cloth In- 
dustry: A seventeenth-century Experiment in State Control, in the Wilt- 
shire Archeological and Natural History Magazine, Dec., 1924, pp. 531- 
42; R. R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North, 1921, pt. iv, chap. ii; 
Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 263-8. For the interven- 
tion of the Privy Council to raise the wages of textile workers and to 
protect craftsmen, Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by 
the Justices of the Peace, in the Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirth- 
schaftsgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 307-37, 533-64; Leonard, The Early 
History of English Poor Relief, pp. 160-3; Victoria County History, 
Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 268-9; and Unwin, Industrial Organization in the 
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904, pp. 142-7. For the Depopu- 
lation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth 
Century, pp. 376, 301. For the squeezing of money from the East India 
Company and the infringement of its Charter, Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, 
The East India Trade in the XV IIth Century, 1923, pp. 60-73. For the 
colonial interests of Puritan members, A. P. Newton, The Colonising 
Activities of the English Puritans, 1914, and C. E. Wade, John Pym, 
IQI2, 

67 RF, Laspeyres, Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen 
der Niederlander und ihrer Litteratur sur Zeit der Republik, 1863, pp. 
256-70. An idea of the points at issue can be gathered from the ex- 
haustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasius, De Modo Usurarum, 1639. 

68 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, vol. i, p. 99. 

69 I‘or the change of sentiment in America, see Troeltsch, Protestantism 
and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writ- 
ings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence of Capi- 
talism, 1915, pp. 116-21. 

70 Rev. Robert Woodrow (quoted by Sombart, op. cit., p. 149). 

71 John Cooke, Unum Necessarium or the Poore Man’s Case (1648), 
which contains a plea for the regulation of prices and the establishment 
of Monts de Piété. 

72 For the scandal caused to the Protestant religion by its alleged 
condonation of covetousness, see T. Watson, 4 Plea for Alms, 1658 
(Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), pp. 21, 33-4: “The Church of Rome layes 
upon us this aspersion that we are against good workes ... I am sorry 
that any who go for honest men should be brought into the indightment ; 
I mean that any professors should be impeached as guilty of this sinne 
of covetousnesse and unmercifulnesse ... I tell you these devout misers 
are the reproach of Christianity ...I may say of penurious votaries, 
they have the wings of profession by which they. seem to fly to heaven, 
but the feet of beasts, walking on the earth and even licking the dust... 
Oh, take heed, that, seeing your religion will not destroy your covetous- 
nesse, at last your covetousnesse does not destroy your religion.” See 
also Sir Balthazar Gerbier, A New Year’s Result in favour of the Poore, 
1651 (Thomason Tracts, E. 651 [14]), p. 4: “If the Papists did rely 
as much on faith as the reformed professors of the Gospel (according 
to our English tenets) doe, or that the reformed professors did so 
much practice charity as the Papists doe?” 

73S. Richardson, op. cit. (see note 60 above), pp. 7-8, 10. 





NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 321 


74 The first person to emphasize the way in which the idea of a 
“calling” was used as an argument for the economic virtues was Weber 
(see note 32 above), to whose conclusions I am largely indebted for the 
following paragraphs. 

7 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

76 Richard Steele, The Tradesman’s Calling, being a Discourse con- 
cerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in general, 1684, 
pp. I, 4. 

7 Ibid., pp. 21-2. 

78 Ibid., p. 35. 

79 Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed., vol. i, p. 336b. 

80 Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit., p. 96n.). 

81 Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p. 168n.). 

82 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, p. IIIa. 

83 Steele, op. cit., p. 20. 

84 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 378b, 108); vol. iv, p. 253a. 

85 Navigation Spiritualized: or a New Compass for Seamen, consisting 
of xxxu Points: 


Pleasant Observations 
of ~ Profitable Applications and 
Serious Reflections. 


All concluded with so many spiritual poems. Whereunto is now added, 


i. A sober conversation of the sin of drunkenness. 
ii. The Harlot’s face in the scripture-glass, etc. 


Being an essay towards their much desired Reformation from the hor- 
rible and detestable sins of Drunkenness, Swearing, Uncleanness, Forget- 
fulness of Mercies, Violation of Promises, and Atheistical Contempt of 
Death. 1682. 

The author of this cheerful work was a Devonshire minister, John 
Flavell, who also wrote Husbandry Spiritualized, or the Heavenly Use 
of Earthly Things, 1669. In him, as in Steele, the Chadband touch is 
unmistakable. The Religious Weaver, apparently by one Fawcett, I 
have not been able to trace. 

86 Steele, op. cit. (see note 76 above). 

87 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

88 David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth’s, 1602. 

89 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 1690, ed. by Professor John 
H. Hollander (4A Reprint of Economic Tracts, Series ii, no. 1). 

90 The words of a member of the Long Parliament, quoted by C. H. 
Firth, Oliver Cromwell, 1902, p. 313. 

1 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1827 ed., vol. ii, p. 235: 
“The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this argu- 
ment [ie., the advantages of war], and shortly after to discourse ‘of the 
infinite benefit that would accrue from a barefaced war against the 
Dutch, how easily they might be subdued and the trade carried by the 
English.’” According to Clarendon, who despised the merchants and 


322 NOTES 


hated the whole business, it was almost a classical example of a com- 
mercial war, carefully stage-managed in all its details, from the director- 
ship which the Royal African Company gave to the Duke of York down 
to the inevitable “incident” with which hostilities began. 

92 [bid., vol. ili, pp. 7-9. 

93 Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, 1691, Preface. 

94 Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface. 

95 Chamberlayne, Anglie Notitia (quoted P. E. Dove, Account of 
Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p. 82n.). 

96 Roger North, The Lives of the Norths (1826 ed.), vol. iii, p. 103; 
T. Watson, A Plea for Alms (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), p. 33; 
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 2nd part, 1682, p. 9, where Sir Robert 
Clayton, Lord Mayor 1679-80, and Member of Parliament for the City 
1679-81 and again from 1689, appears as “extorting Ishban.” He was 
a scrivener who had made his money by usury. 

97 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love, and John Jones. 

98 Charles King (The British Merchant, 1721, vol. i, p. 181) gives the 
following persons as signatories of an analysis of the trade between 
England and France in 1674: Patience Ward, Thomas Papillon, James 
Houblon, William Bellamy, Michael Godfrey, George Toriano, John 
Houblon, John Houghe, John Mervin, Peter Paravicine, John Dubois, 
Benj. Godfrey, Edm. Harrison, Benj. Delaune. The number of foreign 
names is remarkable. 

°9 For Dutch capital in London, see Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Report, 
1881, p. 134 (proceedings of the Committee on the decay of trade, 1669) ; 
with regard to investment of foreign capital in England, it was stated 
that “Alderman Bucknell had above £100,000 in his hands, Mr. Meynell 
above £30,000, Mr. Vandeput at one time £60,000, Mr. Dericost always 
near £200,000 of Dutch money, lent to merchants at 7, 6, and 5 per cent.” 

100 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 289-93, and 
vol. iii, pp. 4-7; and John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street, 
1925. 

101S, Bannister, William Paterson, the Merchant-Statesman, and 
Founder of the Bank of England: His Life and Trials, 1858. 

102 A. Yarranton, England’s Improvement, 1677. 

103 The Complete English Tradesman (1726) belongs to the same 
genus as the book of Steele (see above, pp. 244-6), but it has reduced 
Christianity to even more innocuous proportions: see Letter xvii (Of 
Honesty in Dealing). 

104T, S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, 1924, 
pp. 211-26. Mr. A. P. Wadsworth has shown that the leading Lancashire 
clothiers were often Nonconformists (History of the Rochdale Woollen 
Trade, in Trans, Rochdale Lit. and Sci. Soc., vol. xv, 1925). 

105 Quoted F. J. Powicke, Life of Baxter, 1924, p. 158. 

106 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 1905, pp. 400-1. 

107 The Humble Petition of Thousands of well-affected Persons in- 
habiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, 
Hamlets, and Places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Levellers’ Peti- 
tions, c. 15, 3 Linc.). See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas 
in the Seventeenth Century, 1808. 


NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 323 


108 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, 1891-4, vol. 
ii, pp. 217-21 (letter from Winstanley to Fairfax and the Council of 
War, Dec. 8, 1649). . 

109 Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603-88, ed. Helen Stocks, 
1923, Pp. 370, 414, 428-30. 

110 John Moore, op. cit. (see note 44, above), p. 13. See also E. C. K. 
Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 53-5. 

111 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, vol. i, pp. 299 seqq., Ixvii seqq. 

112 The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt, 1828, vol. i, pp. 175-6. 
A letter from Whalley, referring to agitations against enclosure in 
Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, will be 
found in Thurloe, State Papers, vol. iv, p. 686. 

113 Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p. 9. 

114 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 22 2®, Q,. xxxii, art. v. 

115 Dives et Pauper, 1493, Prol., chap. vii; cf. Pecock, The Repressor 
of over-much Blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii, chap. iv, pp. 296-7. For an 
excellent account of the medieval attitude towards the poor, see B. L. 
Manning, The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 1919, chap. x. 

116 4 [yke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allingham, The Ballad Book, 
1907, no. XxXXi. 

117 Latimer, The fifth Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer (in Sermons, 
Everyman /ed., p. 336). Cf.. Tyndale, The Parable of the. Wicked 
Mammon (in Doctrinal Treatises of William Tyndale, Parker Society, 
1848, p. 97): “If thy brother or neighbour therefore need, and thou 
have to help him, and yet showest not mercy, but withdrawest thy hands 
from him, then robbest thou him of his own, and art a thief.” 

118 Christopher Harvey, The Overseer of the Poor (in G. Gilfillan, 
The Poetical Works of George Herbert, 1853, pp. 241-3). 

119J, E. B. Mayor, Two Lives of N. Ferrar, by his brother John and 
Dr. Jebb, p. 261 (quoted by B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English 
Philanthropy, 1905, p. 54). 

120 4 True Report of the Great Cost and Charges of the foure Hos- 
- pitals in the City of London, 1644 (quoted, ibid., p. 66). 

121 See, ¢.g., Hist. MSS. Comm., Reports on MSS. in various Collec- 
tions, vol. i, 1901, pp. 109-24; Leonard, Early History of English Poor 
Relief, pp. 268-9. 

122 Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse touching Provision for the Poor, 
1683. 

123 Stanley’s Remedy, or the Way how to reform wandering Beggars, 
Thieves, Highway Robbers and Pick-pockets, 1646 (Thomason Tracts, 
E. 317°[6]), p. 4. 

124 Commons’ Journals, March 19, 1648/9, vol. vi, p. 167. 

125 [bid., vol. vi, pp. 201, 374, 416, 481; vol. vii, p. 127. 

126 Samuel Hartlib, London’s Charity Inlarged, 1650, p. i. 

127 Hartlib, op. cit. 

128 Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1911, vol. 
ii, pp. 104-10. An ordinance creating a corporation had been passed 
Dec. 17, 1647 (ibid., vol. i, pp. 1042-5). 

129 [bid., vol. ii, pp. 1098-0. 


324 NOTES 


130 Stockwood, at Paul’s Cross, 1578 (quoted by Haweis, Sketches of 
the Reformation, p. 277). 

131 Steele, op. cit. (note 76 above), p. 22. 

182 R, Younge, The Poores’ Advocate, 1654 (Thomason Tracts, E. 
1452 [3]), p. 6. 

183 For these and other passages from Restoration economists to the 
same effect, see a striking article by Dr. T. E. Gregory on The Eco- 
nomics of Employment in England (1660-1713) in Economica, no. 1, 
Jan., 1921, pp. 37 seqqg., and E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Labourer 
in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. v, vi. 

134 Das Kommunistische Manifest, 1918 ed., pp. 27-8: “Die Bourgeoisie, 
wo sie zur Herrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patriarchalischen, 
idyllischen verhaltnisse zerstért. Sie hat die buntscheckigen Feudal- 
bande, die den Menschen an seinen nattirlichen. Vorgesetzten knupften, 
unbarmherzig zerrissen, und kein anderes Band zwischen Mensch und 
Mensch iibrig gelassen, als das nackte Interesse, als die gefiihllose bare 
Zahlung.” 

135 Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, 1704, pp. 25-7. 

136 Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 45. 

187 Sir Henry Pollexfen, Discourse of Trade, 1697, p. 49; Walter 
Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland, 1691, 
pp. 43-4; The Querist, 1737 (in The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., 
ed. A. C. Fraser, 1871, p. 387); Thomas Alcock, Observations on the 
Defects of the Poor Laws, 1752, pp. 45 seqq. (quoted Furniss, op. cit., 
Porrss): 

138 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, 1771, vol. iv, p. 361. 

139 Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. x, 
Of Provision made for the Poor. 

140 FH, Hunter, Problems of Poverty: Selections from the... Writ- 
ings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., 1912, p. 202. 

141 For the influence of Chalmers’ idea on Senior, and, through him, 
on the new Poor Law of 1834, see T. Mackay, History of the English 
Poor Law, vol. iii, 1899, pp. 32-4. Chalmers held that any Poor Law 
was in itself objectionable. Senior, who described Chalmers’ evidence 
before the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland as “the most 
instructive, perhaps, that ever was given before a Committee of the 
House of Commons,” appears to have begun by agreeing with him, but 
later to have adopted the principle of deterrence, backed by the test 
workhouse, as a second best. The Commissioners of 1832-4 were right 
in thinking the existing methods of relief administration extremely bad; 
they were wrong in supposing distress to be due mainly to lax adminis- 
tration, instead of realizing, as was the fact, that lax administration 
had arisen as an attempt to meet the increase of distress. Their dis- 
cussion of the causes of pauperism is, therefore, extremely superficial, — 
and requires to be supplemented by the evidence contained in the various 
contemporary reports (such, e.g., as those on the hand-loom binge 
dealing with the industrial aspects of the problem. 

142, W. C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 1910, pp. 


a 


NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 325 


560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the Quakers 
in Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing) in The Complete English Trades- 
man. Mr. Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, p. 219) 
remarks, “The eighteenth century Friend no less than the medieval Cath- 
olic held firmly to some doctrine of Just Price,’ and quotes examples 
from the conduct of Quaker iron-masters. 


‘ 


Ue Nas bes 





INDEX 


Abbot’s Ripton, 140, 308 

Acton, Lord, 65 

Acts of Parliament: 
EBSatd 111, st.s1, ¢.5' (1341), 52 
37 Hen. VIII, c. 9 (1545), 159 
Saands 0. Ed. V1, c.20.<(1552), 

159, 180 
E3tz.,4C..o. (1571), 159, 180, 
181, 187 

39 Eliz., c. 2 (1597), 178 

Aegidius Lessinus, 295, 2 

Aeneas Silvius, 110 

Agriculture, 136-50, 231. See also 
“Enclosures, Land, Pasture farm- 
ing, Peasants 

Alcock, Thomas, 270 

Alien immigrants, 205, 314 

Almsgiving, condemnation of, 
114, 265, 305; a duty, 260-1 

America, silver of, 68, 74, 
Calvinism in, 127-32, 227, 
320 

Bee 216-7, 318 

Amsterdam, 104 

Anglicans. See Clergy and Church 
of England 

Annuities, 42, 217 

Antwerp, 72, 73-5, 79, 80, 86, 87, 
BOA, S105; 1278, 303; tall of; 77, 
176 

Apparel, excess in, 115, 127 

Aquinas. See St. Thomas 

Archdeacons, visitations of, 48, 52, 
162, 206-7, 310 

Aristotle, 44 

Asceticism, 17, 18, 19 

Ashton, 1 ..9.,: 252,325 

Aske, 141 

Augsburg, 


Pit; 


135; 
238, 


79, 85 

Bacon, 148, 151, 185 

Baillie, 214 

Bancroft, Archbishop, 
214 

Bank, at Geneva, 120 

—of England, 252 

Banking, deposit, 
176 


186, 213, 


beginnings of, 


Barbon, Dr. Nicholas, 247 

Barebones, Praise- God, 247 

Bargaining, equity in, 152, 159, 181, 
183, 188, 221-3, 224, 244, 272. 
See also Prices and Profits 

Baro, 215, 318 

Basle, 120; Council of, 103 

Baxter, Richard, 9, I9, 200, 203, 
207, 219-24, 226, 242 (quoted), 
243 (quoted), 253, 260, 268, 2901 

Becon, 82, 141, 744 

Beggars. See Almsgiving and 
Vagrancy 

Bellarmin, 80, 303 

Bellers, 19, 272 

Belloc, H., 92 

Bennet, Dr., 153 

Benvenuto da Imola, quoted, 11 

Berkeley, Bishop, 270, 284 

Berne, 120 

Berthold, Brother, 225 

Bézawriomi2ziei22 tease 21s 

Birmingham, 204 

Bishops, articles of visitation of, 
161; were normally justices, 165 ; 


Bill re powers of, 174-5, 312; 
abolition of, 188, 214. See also 
Commissary, Court of High 


Commission and Courts, ecclesi- 
astical 

Blaxton, John, cited, 156 

Bodin, 81 

Boheim, Hans, 81 

Bolingbroke, 207 

Bologna, University of, 81 

Boniface VIII, 19; bull of, 21 

Bossuet, 83 

Boston, 128-31 

Bourges, 50 

Braddon, Lawrence, 315 

Bradford, 204 

—, Governor, 127 (quoted), 128 

Brentano, 316 

Bristol, 202 

Brittany, Count of, 299 

Bruges, 73 

Bucer, 10, 63, 81, 83, 105, 116, 142, 
215 


327 


328 


Bullinger, 19, 81, 114, 181 

Bunyan, 9, 19, 199, 225, 208, 307 
Burford, 181 

Buridanus, Johannes, 295 

Bury, 218 


Cahorsines, 29, 294, 207 

“Calling,” 240-6, 316, 321 ; 

Calvin, 10, 19, 94, 102-32; teaching 
of, on usury, 81, 83, 126, 181, 
215, 216, 233, 239; letter of, to 
Somerset, 116; Institutes of, 
116, 117; scheme of municipal 
government drafted by, 117; 
death of, 119. See also Cal- 
vinism 

Calvinism, 102-32, 233-5}; sancti- 
fication of economic enterprise 
by, 34, 104-5, 108, 109, 110, III, 
116, 233, 239; connection of in- 
dividualism with, 112-3, 227, 
316-7; discipline of, 112, I13, 
115-32, 215, 219, 227, 234, 238, 
316-7; in France, 125-6; in 
Scotland, 126-7; development of, 
in England, 198; in Holland, 
211. See also Calvin and Puri- 
tanism 

Cambridge, 318 

Canon law. See Law, canon 

Canonists, chicanery and casuistry 
of, 37, 51, 54, 60, 100. See also 
Law, canon 

Canterbury, 205; archbishop of, 
47, 156; Canons of, 161 

Capitalism, early appearance of, 
16, 26, 84, 226; connection of, 
with Puritanism, 212, 315-8 

Carpenters, parliament of, 292 

Cartwright, Thomas, 213, 215 

Sena ts and capitalism, 84, 
21 

Cattle, loaning of, 54, 154, 181-2 

Cecil, William, 145, 165 

Chalmers, Dr., 271, 324 

Charles I, social policy of, 169-74, 
211, 235-8, 319-20 

Charles V, 71, 79 

Chaucer, 23 (quoted), 302 

Chauvet, 123 

Chesterton, G. K., 92 

Chevage, 147 

Chevisance, 51 

Choisy, 306 

Church, medieval, pomp and 
avarice of, 59, 60, 62; attitude 


INDEX 


of, to established social order, 


56-9; strength and weakness of, — 


59-60; ideals of, 60-2 

—of England, 135-93; conserva- 
tism and ineffectiveness of so- 
cial theory of, 85, 155-7, 184-93, 
282; Puritanism represented in, 


198 

Church of Ireland, 161 | 

See also Clergy, Councils 

(Church), Courts (ecclesiasti- 
cal), Law (canon), Papacy, 
Reformation, Religion, and 
under State 

Churches, Nonconformist, attitude 
of, to social problems in 18th 
century, 281. See also Presby- 
terianism, Puritanism, Tolerance 

Civil Law. See Law, civil 

Clarendon Code, 205 

—, Constitutions of, 51 

—, Earl of, 173, 204, 249, 252, 321 

Class hatred, 18, 123, 145 

Classes, Puritan, 213, 217, 
318 

Clayton, Sir Robert, 322 

Clergy, taking of usury by, 30, 46, 
53, 292-3, 300; subservience of, 
159, 281; return of, to City 
churches, 204; popular sym- 
pathies of, in France, 281. See 
also Church of England 

Cloth industry, 105, 136, 142, 147; 
capitalism in, 70, 176, 268-9; 
distress in, 168, 205, 314; wages 
in, 174, 203, 320; regulation of, 
174, 236, 237, 319; Puritanism 
in centers of, 202, 203, 204, 322; 
proposed nationalization of, 236. 
See also Textile workers 

Coke, 186 

Colbert, 77, 236 

Cologne, 37. ~ 

Colonization, 71, 238, 320 

Colquhoun, Patrick, 313 

Columbus, 67, 69, 89 

Combinations, 55, 87-8, 95-6, 203. 
See also Gilds 


317; 


Commissary, Court of, 53, 162, 
300, 310 

Commissions, Depopulation, 138, 
145, 173, 237, 320 

ommons, enclosure of, 140, 167, 
174, 256, 259, 260. See alsa 


Enclosures 
“Commonwealth men,” 145 


INDEX 


Communal movement, 56 

Communism, 32, 256 

Companies, iniringement of char- 
ters of, 237. See also East India 
Co. and Royal African Co. 

Confessors, instructions to, 48-9 

Congregationalism, 198 

Consistory, at Geneva, 116, 117, 
119-24 

Constance, Council of, 103 

Consumption, 34, 231, 248, 251 

Copper, 73, 75, 79 

Copyholders, 139, 147, 167, 308 

Corn, engrossing of, 123, 168, 174, 
311. See also Granaries 

Coulton, G. G., II, 30 

Councils, Church, 46-7, 51, 54, 206 

Court, De la, 206 

Court of Arches, 186 

A, Chancery, 51, 53, 295, 300 

— Delegates, 186 

— High Commission, 162, 186-7, 
237, 313; abolition of, 188, 213, 
214 

— Requests, 139, 308 

— Star Chamber, 139, 174, 308, 
311, 312, 319; abolition of, 213 

Courts, jurisdiction of, with re- 
gard to usury, 37-9, 50-4, 160-2; 
ecclesiastical, 50-4, 160-2, 186-8, 
213, 214, 300, 301; royal, en- 
croachments of, on feudal sys- 
tem, 57-8, 87. See also the 
several Courts above-mentioned 

Coventry, 37, 309 

Craftsmen, deceits practiced by, 24, 
126, 298; relations between mer- 
chants and, 26, 136, 137, 173-4, 
236, 320; labor of, honorable, 
92, 240. See also Guilds and 
W age-earners 

Cranmer, 83, 160 

Cromwell, Oliver, 199, 
(quoted), 249, 258, 317 

Crowley, Robert, 82, 141, 144, 146 
(quoted), 148 (quoted) 

Cunningham, William, 
(quoted ) 

Curia, papal, 47-8 

Currency, depreciation of, 77, 78, 
137, 177 


Dantzig, 100 

Debtor, defaulting, punishment of, 
127 

Dedham, classis of, 217-8 


219, 227 


S125 213 


329 
Defoe; 205, 252, 315, 324, 325 


Depopulation. See Commissions 
and Enclosures 
D’Ewes, 217 


Dicey, Prof., 254 

Diet, Imperial, 88 

Diggers, 256, 317 

Discipline, versus the Religion of 
Trade, 211-27. See also Calvin- 
ism, Presbyterianism, Puritanism 

PASE Ry SUeSs 67; 60, °73, 80; 57, 135; 
31 

Dives et Pauper, 9, 216, 261, 323 

Downing, Sir George, 252 

Duns Scotus, 33 

Dutch, virtues of, 211, 252, 269; 
capital supplied to England by, 


249, 252, .322; imitation of 
methods of, 252. See also Hol- 
land 

East Anglia, 174; Puritanism in, 
202, 203 

— India Co., 320 

Eck, 81 


Economic science, development of, 
7-10, 80, 158, 180, 185, 180, 204, 
249-50. See also Economists 

Economists, 249; attitude of, 
towards religious tolerance, 10, 
204-5, 206-7; attitude of, to- 
wards poor relief, 267-72, 323-4. 
See also Economic Science 

Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 
205 

Education, diffusion of, 141, 142, 
143; parochial, 154. See also 
Schools 

Enclosures, 137-50; popular agita- 
tions against, 137-8, 140, 143-5, 
256-7, 323; first account of, 138; 
steps taken by Government to 
check, 138, 145, 147, 172-3, 178, 
230, 255, 300, 311, 312; attitude 
of Puritans to, 217, 224, 236, 
255-60. See also under Gentry 

England, comparison of, with the 
Continent, 8, 16, 54, 70, 135, 231 

Engrossers, 36, 38, 40, 55, I19, 122, 
123, 164, 168, 174, 191, 236, 239, 
244, 311, 312 

Erasmus, 72, 76 

Erastians, 214 

Essex, 162, 203 

Evangelicals, 193, 254 

Exchanger, Royal, 237 


330 


Exchanges, foreign, discussions on, 
43). 158 117774 310; control) “of, 
74; 168, 236, 237, 311, 319; law- 
fulness of transactions on, 80-I 

Exchequer, stop of, 224 

Exclusion Bill, 203 

Excommunication, 29, 45, 46, 47, 
C2 aLIG tl 2lyy 42 VIO, 1284, nc 
disregarding of, 159, 187 

Exeter, 204; bishop of, 169 


Fairs, 45 

Fenton, Roger, 
305 

Ferrar, Nicholas, 263 

Feudalism, 22, 57-9, 231; decline 
of, 57-8, 147, 149, 174. See also 
Peasants 

Figgis, Dr., 6 

Financiers, medieval attitude to, 
23, 33, 104-5; international, rise 
of, 72, 75-6, 78-9; Catholicism 
of, 84; attitude of Swiss re- 
formers to, 104, 108. See also 


quoted, 106, 157, 


Usury 
Firmin, 272 
Flanders. See Low Countries 


Flavell, John, 321 

Fletcher of Saltoun, 265 

Florence, 16, 37, 50, 292, 295, 316 

Foley, Thomas, 253 

Fondaco Tedesco, 68 

Food-supplies, control of, 173-4, 
235, 236, 262., Seé also Corn 

Fox, 199, 200 

Foxe, 160 

France, 54, 77, 236, 250, 268, 281, 
203, 302, 315; peasantry in, 58, 
59, 136, 151; Calvinism in, 125-6, 
‘203, 238. See also Lyons and 
Paris 

Franciscans, 18, 54; Spiritual, 57 

Franeker, University of, 216 

Frankfurt, 26, 75, 85, 110 

Franklin, Benjamin, 238, 320 

Free Cities, 56 

Freeholders, 202, 203, 258 

Freiburg, 86 

Friars, 18 

Friends. See Quakers 

Friesland, West, 238 

Froissart, 18 

Froude, 5 

Fruiterers, of London, 55 

Fuggers, the, 79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90, 
I9I, 303 


INDEX 


Gay, Prof., 146 

Geiler von Kaiserberg, 88, 304 

Geneva, 103, 104, I13, 115-25, 215; 
226, 227, 234, 235, 306 

Genoa, 48 

Gentry, opposition of, to preven- 
tion of enclosures, 145, 147, 178, 
235, 237; 255-7, 258, 309; atti- 
tude of, to commercial classes, 
207-10 

George, Lloyd, quoted, 4, 291 

Germany, 54, 68, 77, 250; schemes 
of social reconstruction in, 27, 
88, 302; peasantry in, 58, 50, 
81, 82, 86-7, 88, 91, 93, 136, 139, 
I5I, 302; trade and banking 
business of, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78-9, 
86-8, 89-90, 316; Reformation in, 
70, Sr, 82, 83, Qs. -102, IIO, 1413 
wage-earning class in, in Middle 
Ages, 86, 292 

Gilds, membership of, 26; policy 
and ideals of, 26-8; enforcement 
of rules of, 52, 300; loans by, 
54, 301; capture of, by capitalist 
members, 69, 86, 136; control of, 
at Antwerp, 75; malpractices of, 
137, 203; confiscation of lands 
of, 139, 309 

Glasgow, 238 

Gloucester, 204 

Godfrey, Michael, 252 

Goldsmiths, 249 

Granaries, public, 236, 319 

Gratian, 32, 35 

Gregory VIL 19 

Gresham, Sir Richard, 140 

—, Sir Thomas, 9, 143, 


179 
Grindal, Archbishop, 160 
Grosstéte, Bishop, 20, 203 


178, 


Hague, The, 252 

Hale, Sir Matthew, 263 

Hales, John, 145 

Halifax, 204 

Hamilton, John. See St. Andrews, 
Archbishop of 

Hammond, Mr. and Mrs., 18 

Hanse League, 68, 73 

Harrington, 176 

Harris, Walter, 270 

Harrison, 270 

Hartlib, Samuel, 264 

Hatfield Chase, 174 

Haugs, the, 79 


INDEX 


Heming, Nicholas, 156, 158 
(quoted) 

Henry of Ghent, quoted, 34 

—of Langenstein, quoted, 36, 42 

Herberts, the, 140, 146 

Hinde, 312 

Hipler, 88, 304 

Hobbes, 1 

Hochstetters, the, 79, 88, 303 

Holland, 8; wars and commercial 
rivalry of England with, 7, 240, 
252, 208, 321; religious develop- 
ments in, IO, 211, 227; economic 
progress of, 10, 204, 211, 216, 
231, 316; controversy in, about 
usury, 126, 238; middle classes 
in, 208, 211; emigration of Dis- 
senters to, 314. See also Dutch 
and Low Countries 

Holland, Lord, 237 

Hooker, Richard, 166, 170, 234 

Hospitals, 144, 263; loans by, 54, 


301 
Hostiensis, 158, 304 
Houblon, James and John, 252 
House of Commons, 143, 178, 179, 
187, 264 
—of Convocation, 160 
Huguenots, 252 
Humanists, 79, 110, 114, 262 
Hungary, 75, 79 
Hutten, 88, 304 


Imhofs, the, 79 

Independents, I12, 212, 214, 
252 a 

Indians, American, 130, 185 

Indifferentism, 17, 18, 19, 188, 280 

Individualism, rise of, TOt135n ez, 
6s, 74, 81, 141, 163, 166, 172, 
175-03, 227, 235, 250, 253, 254, 
262, 316-7; deduction of, from 
teaching of reformers, Qo- -4, 90, 
112-3, 226-7. See also under 
Puritanism 

Industrial Revolution, 18, 193 

Innocent IV, 20, 44, 203 

Interesse, 42, 43, 95 

Interest, rate of, 120, 124, 128, 153, 
162, 180, B22" “pure,” 42; true 
and unfeigned, not usury, 304. 
See also Interesse and Usury 

Ireland, 231, 270, 324; Church of, 
161 

Ireton, 258 

Iron industry, 202, 220, 252-3, 325 


210, 


331 


Italy, 9, 54, 72; medieval capital- 
ism in, 26, 84, 86, 316; wage- 
earners in, 26, 38, 292; finan- 
ciers of, 20, 45, 73, 136; canon- 
ists of, 54; economic position of, 
67, 60, 70, 231. See also Flor- 
ence and Venice 


Jacquerie, 58 

Jewel, Bishop, 82, 156 

Jews, 37, 249 

John XXII, bull of, 57 

John of Salisbury, quoted, 22, 24, 
292 

ages tous enterprise, outburst of, 
17 

Jones, Rev. David, 246 

Journeymen. See Wage-earners 

Justices in Eyre, 51 

—of Assize, 173 

—of the Peace, usurers dealt with 
by, 164, 168; regulation of 
markets and of wages by, 173; 
closing of public-houses by, 218; 
administration of poor laws by, 


236, 263; administration of 
orders against enclosures by, 
173, 255 

Keane, Robert, 128-31 

Ket, 144, 302 


Keynes, J. M., 251, 286 
Kidderminster, 207, 220 
King’s Lynn, 301, 300 
Knewstub, 215, 318 
Knox, John, 10, 109, 
(quoted), 127, 213 


TIS.4e8IS 


Lancashire, Puritanism in, 203, 
204, 214, 322. See also Bury 
Land, 9, 137-50; purchase of, by 
nouveaux riches, and speculation 
in, 87, 139-41, 143-4, 176, 208, 
207: mortgaging of, 103, 168. 
See also Enclosures, Landlords, 
Pasture farming, Property, 

Rent-charge, Rents 

Landlords, oppressions of, 50, 140, 
155, 164, 167, 172, 223, 236, 238, 
298; ecclesiastical, management 
of) estates ) by, 58-9, 130, 
144. See also Peasants and 
Rents 

Lanfranc, 18 

Langland, 18, 261 

Lateran Councils, 46, 54 


332 INDEX 


Latimer, 10, 19, 82, I41, 145, 255, 
256, 262, 275, 287 

Laud, 10, 19, 113, 133, 170-5, 188, 
205, 210, 213, 236, 237, 255, 311 

Laurentius de Rudolfis, 9, 291 

Law, canon, 9, 165; rules of, as to 
usury, 10, 36-55, 94, 95; serf- 
dom recognized by, 58; discredit 
of, 62, 65, 143, 159, 187; con- 
tinued appeal to, 81, 85, 152-63, 
305-6; compatibility of exchange 
business ‘with, 80. See also 
Canonists 

—, civil, 159-60 

—,common, 159, 161, 186 

—,natural, 30, -62, 179-80, 1092, 
259, 278 

Law, John, 253 

—, William, 190 

Layton, Dr., 159 

Leach, A. F., 143 

Leadam, 146 

Lease-mongers, 144 

Lee, Joseph, quoted, 259 

Leeds, 204 

Leicester, 204, 256, 258 

Leonard, Miss, 173 

Levellers, 19, 212, 255, 317 

Lever, 82, 141, 144, 156 

Linen industry, 142 

Lisbon, 79, 86, 87 

Loans, ’ charitable, 54, 154, 164, 203, 
301; public, indemnification of 
subscribers to, 179. See also 
Interest and Usury 

ee 7 (quoted), 179, 189, 250, 


25 

Lollards, 50 

Lombard bankers, 20, 51 

London, 26, 51, 52, 55, 140, 263; 
growth of money-market in, 75, 
136, 177; Nonconformity in, 
104, 203, 204, 214, 243, 252; fire 
of, 204, 221; bishop of, 20, 53, 
162, 204 

Lotteries, 126, 306 

Low Countries, -70, 7I, 72-3, 77; 
231 ; early capitalism in, 16, 25, 84, 
292, 316; wage-earners in, 25-6, 
38, 202; Monts de Piété in, 54, 
301; religious tolerance in, 206. 
See also Antwerp and Holland 

Luchaire, A., 30 

Luther, 10, 19, 36, 79-102, 103, 104, 
105, 107, 116, 241, 265, 208 

Lyndwood, 54 


Lyons, 75, 77, 120; Poor Men of, 
18; Council of, 46 


Machiavelli, 7, 80, 184, 316 

Maidstone, 205 

Maitland, 159 

Major, 107 

Malynes, G., 17 

Mandeville, 190 athedys 313 

Manning, B. L., 19 

Marx, Karl, 36, 112, 269 

Massachusetts, 127-31, 238 

Melanchthon, Sr, 92, 107, 158 

Mendicant orders, 92, 240 

Mercantilism, 31, 80, 237, 251 

Merchant Adventurers, 68, 73 

Merchants. See Traders 

Merchet, 147 

Meutings, the, 79, 303 

Middle classes, rise of, 8, 86, 87, 
04, III, 176, 177, 208, 234, 268, 
269 ; Calvinism and Puritanism 
among, III, 113, 187, 202-I0, 
211-2, 231, 266, 317; qualities of, 
III, 208, 211, 230-1; humbler, at- 
titude of, to rising commercial- 
ism, 163-4; economic position of, 
207-8, 244, 315 

Middlemen. See Traders 

Mill, James, 243 

Milton, 190, 231 

Mines, of New World, 68; of 
Europe, 68, *75,-793 capitalism 
in working of, 70, 176 

Monarchy, paternal, 211, 232, 235, 
236-8, 253, 319. See also Charles 
I and Tudors 

Monasteries, loans by, 54, 301; re- 
lief of beggars by, 92, 114, 266; 
dissolution of, 138-41, 144, 308, 


300 

Moneylenders. See Interest, Loans 
(public), Usury 

Money-market. See Exchanges, 
Financiers, and under London 

Monopolies. See Patents 

Monopolists, denunciations of, 38, 
81, 88, 93, 96, 119, 221 

Montagu, 253 

Montesquieu, 208 

Monts de Piété, 43, 54, 301, 320 

Moore, John, 257, 259 

More, Sir Thomas, 73, 138, 139 

Mosse, Miles, 156, 158, 160 
(quoted) 

Muliins, Archdeacon, 310 


‘ 
es ee 


INDEX 


Nationalism, 68, 77 

Netherlands. See Low Countries 

New England, Calvinism in, 127-32, 
227, 238 

New Model Army, 219 

Nicholas III, 29 

Nonconformists. See Churches 
(Nonconformist), Independents, 
Presbyterianism, Puritanism, 
Quakers, Tolerance 

Norfolk, 168, 203 

North, Sir Dudley, quoted, 250 

Notre-Dame, Cathedral of, 30, 204 

Nurnberg, 85, 110 


O’Brien, G., 43 (cited) 
(Ecolampadius, 82, 106, I14 
Oresme, Nicholas, 9, 291 
Owen, Robert, 272 
Oziander, 83 


Paget, 145 

Paley, 287 

Pallavicino, 178 

Papacy, avarice and corruption of, 
29, 85, 89-90, 92, I10, III; finan- 
cial relations of, 29, 30, 44, 290-7 

Papillon, Thomas, 252 

Papists, unaptness of, for business, 
206; charity of, 233, 265, 320 

Parise) 209675, 7.00,. $20;81325,!5203' 
bishop of, 30, 294 

Parish, loans by, 54, 154, 301; or- 
ganization of, 154-5, 312 

Parker, Bishop, 204 

Parliament, Levellers’ 
for reform of, 255 

Parliament, Barebones, 219, 247 

—, Long, 175, 187, 237, 255, 257 

“Parliaments,” of wage-earners, 
26, 202 

Partnership, profits of, lawful, 42, 
295; fictitious, 48, 297 

Pasture farming, 136, 137, 139, 140, 
Tazo tac? 173, 178 See -also 
Enclosures 

Patents, 236, 237, 319 

Paterson, William, 253 

Pawnshops, public, 164 

Peasants, associations among, 27; 
harshness of lot of, 57-8; re- 
volts of, 58, 59, 70, 140, 143-5, 
256, 302; revolts of, in Ger- 
many, 58, 59, 81, 82, 88, QI, 93, 
139, 145, 302 emancipation of, 
from etdom, 58, 59, 69, 87, 


demands 


333 


130, 147; comparison of, with 
peasantry of France and Ger- 
many, 59, 86-7, 136, 151; calling 
of, praised, 92. See also Jac- 
querie and Landlords 

Peckham, Archbishop, 29 

Pecock, Bishop, 50, 55, 100, 297-8, 
301 

Penn, William, 188 

Pennsylvania, 238 

Pepper, 75 

Pepys, 204 

Petty, Sir William, 206, 250, 251 
(quoted ) 

Piccarda, 17 

Pilgrimage of Grace, 141 

Pirenne, Prof., 74, 292 

Political Arithmetic, 10, 
204, 250. 
Science 

Pollexfen, Sir Henry, 269 

Ponet, 82, 141 

Poor, relief of, 82, 92, 114, I41, 
144, 155, I6I, 193, 239; invest- 
ment of money for benefit of, 
126, 182, 306; legislation re re- 
lief of, 127, 262, 264-6, 271, 323, 
324; administration of laws for 
relief of, 168, 173-4, 236, 263; 
right of, to relief, 264-5, 271; 
relief to, to be deterrent, 271, 
324; able-bodied, employment of, 
168; 202% 264) 265° 271; \ 323-4, 
See also Almsgiving, Poverty, 
Vagrancy 

— Law Commissioners, 271, 324 

— Men of Lyons, 18 

Portugal, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84 

Poverty, attitude of Swiss re- 
formers to, 105, I14-5, 132; atti- 
tude to, in eighteenth century, 
189-90; attitude of Puritans to, 
231, 233, 253-5, 260-73; medieval 
attitude to, 260-I, 323; attitude 
of Quakers to, 272; causes of, 
262, 264-5, 205-7, 270, 324. See 
also Poor 

Predestination, 108, I12 

Presbyterianism, 198, 213-5, 217-8, 
234, 317, 318. ‘See also Puri- 
tanism 

Presbyterians, 203, 
struggle between 
and, 112, 212, 214 

Prices, rise! inj 00,170}" 754.08, 197; 
147, 177, 180: just, doctrine with 


185, 189, 
See also Economic 


207, sr2R23 
Independents 


334 


regard to, 17, 36, 4I, 81, 04-5, 
153, 156, 216-7, 222, 225, 244, 
268, 203, 295, 318, 325; control 
of, 41, I17, 119, 122, 123, 128-30, 
142, 143, 168, 173, 174, 262, 320; 
opposition to control of, 170, 235; 
315. See also Bargaining 

Privy Council, activities of, 166-9, 
173-4, 236-8, 263, 320 | 

Production, 248, 249, 251 

Profits, medieval doctrine as to, 
32, 34-6, 42, 104; attempted limi- 
tation of, in New England, 127- 
31. See also Traders 

Property, theories with regard to, 
32, 102, 146-50, 189, 258, 261, 262 

Prophesyings, 201 

Public-houses, closing of, 218 

Puritanism, 195-273; quarrel be- 
tween monarchy and, 6, 212, 232, 
235-8, 318-9; medieval, 18; dis- 
cipline of, I13, 127-31, 187, 213-0, 
234-5, 317; theology of, 113, 
227-30; connection of individual- 
ism with, 113, 127, 2124216))-210, 
227, 229-390, 253, 254, 266, 271, 
272, 316; divergent elements in, 
198, 212-3, 316; sanctification of 
business life by, 199, 201, 230, 
233, 230-54, 272; geographical 
distribution of, 202-4; connection 
of, with capitalism, 212, 316-7. 
See also Calvinism, Middle 
classes, New England, Poverty, 
Presbytertanism, Usury 


Gaees 10,°272.326 

Quarter Sessions. See Justices of 
the Peace 

Quicksilver, 79 


Rabelais, 77 

Rationalism, medieval, 18 

Reformation, relation of, to 
changes in social theory, 14-5, 
19-20, 65-6, 81, 82-5, 89-03, 141, 
154, 155-60 

Regensburg, 85, 225 

Religion, sphere of, Brainerd 
5, 8-10, 14, 18, 19-36, 60-2, 
8-5, 90-1, 97-8, 90, 148, Sas, 
182-3, 221, 224-6, 278, 270, 281-2, 
285 (see ‘also under Traders) ; : 
economic and social activities 
excluded from ‘province of, 5, 
6-13, 17, 91, 96-101, 175, 177-93, 


INDEX 


221, 226, 238, 254-5, 277, 278-87; 
wars of, 6-7, 119. See also 
Asceticism, Calvinism, Indif- 
ferentism, Presbyterianism, Puri- 
tanism, Reformation, Tolerance 

Rent-charge, considered lawful, 42, 
43, 95, 182, 216, 217, 295 

Rents, control of, at Geneva, 117; 
raising of, I19, 140, 146, 153; 
Baxter’s teaching as to, 224 

Rhode Island, 238 

Riches, medieval attitude to, 32, 
34-5, 55, 285, 301-2; attitude of 
Calvinists and Puritans to, 105, 
132, 230, 2390, 267; modern atti- 
tude to, 282-7. See also Finan- 
ciers and Traders 

Ridley, Thomas, quoted, 186 

Ripon, 53 

Rome, corruption and avarice at, 
28-30, 85, 90, 92, II0 

Root and Branch Petition, 314 

Rotenburg, 86 

Rouen, 75 

Rousseau, 203 

Royal African Co., 249, 322 


St. Ambrose, 260 
St. Andrews, 127; archbishop of, 


50 

St. Antonino, 9, 17, 32, 40-I, 88, 
225, 291, 204, 205 

St. Augustine, 48 

St. Bernard, 30 

St Erancts,718)«57 

St. Johns, the, 140, 308 

St. Léon, Martin, 28 (quoted), 
292, 203 

St. Raymond, 48, 153 

St. Thomas, 17, 20 (quoted), 31, 
33, 35. (quoted), 36, 39 (quoted), 
40, 58, 152, 200, 225, 260, 304 

Salerno, archbishop of, 48 

Salisbury, bishop of, 156; mayor 
of, 218 

Sanderson, Bishop, 188 

Sandwich, 205 

Sandys, en, 82, 156 

Says Jeeb., 

Saye and Sele, Lord, 174, 312 

Schoolmen, 9, 16, 10, 30-6, 40-1, 
80, 82, 148, 152, 155, 158, 183, 
225. See also St. Antonino and 
St. Thomas 

Schools, confiscation of endow- 
ments of, 143, 300; establish- 


INDEX 


ment of, by Church, 193. See 
also Education 
Schulze-Gaevernitz, 212 


Scotland, 113, 126-7, 227; Com- 
missioners from, 214 

Scriveners, 176 

Self-interest, of individual, har- 


mony of needs of society with, 


13, 24, 179-80, I91, 192, 246, 
259-60, 277. See also Individ- 
ualism 


Senior, Nassau, 271, 324 

Serfdom, 57-9; attitude of Church 
to, 22, 58-9, 302. See also 
Peasants 

Serfs, runaway, 139, 147, 308. See 
also Peasants 

Seville, 75, 135 

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 249 

Shaw, W. A., 215 

Sheep-grazing. See Pasture farm- 


ing 

Sheldon, Dr. Gilbert, 311 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 140 

Sigismund, Emperor, Reformation 
Ofi027>,85, 203 

Silver, of America, Go 7am E355 Of 
Europe, 79 

Sion, monastery of, 140 

Slave-trade, 185 

Smiles, Samuel, 253 

Smith, Adam, 35, 192, 253, 293 

—, Rev. Henry, 215, 318 

—, Sir Thomas, 160 

Smiths, of London, 52, 292, 300 

Soap, monopoly of, 237, 319 

Social Democratic movement, 219 

Society, functional theory of, 13, 
22-5, 93, 97, 149, 169-70, 171, 
172, 189, 191, 254; modern con- 
ception of, 12-3, 22, 189, 191 

Somerset, Duke of, 116, 147, 309 

South Sea Bubble, tot 

Spain, 70, 71, 72, 77, 79, 84; dealers 
of, on Antwerp Bourse, 80 

Speculation. See Engrossers 

Speenhamland, 264 

Spices, trade in, 74, 75, 79, 86 

Spinola, 178 

Spurriers, of London, 52, 300 

Starkey, 22, 138, 202 

State, relation between Church 
and, 6-10, 18-9, 20, 70, OI, I0I-2, 
124, 159, 165-6, 170-1, 172, 175, 
278-9; Locke’s conception of, 7 
(quoted), 170, 189; unitary, sov- 


335 


ereignty of, 278, 293; Distribu- 
tive, 92, 151 

Steele, Richard, 240, 243 (quoted), 
243-5, 251, 266 

Step-lords, 146 

Stockwood, Rev. J., quoted, 266 

Strafford, Earl of, 210, 213, 236 

Strassburg, 75 

Stubbes, Philip, 216 

Summe, 16, 19, 30, 220. 
Schoolmen 

Swift, Dean, 207 

Switzerland, Reformation in, 102- 
25, 141, 205; bourgeoisie in, III, 
122, 208 

Synods, French, 125-6 


See also 


Taunton, 204 

Taylor, Jeremy, 160 (quoted), 188 

Temple, Sir William, 206 

Tenures, military, abolition of, 257 

Textile workers, of Flanders and 
Ltaly.4- 2662025 O£*' Paris;* 203. 
For England see under Cloth 
industry 

Tobacco, 127 

Tolerance, religious, 113, 118, 175, 
219; commercially advantageous, 
10, 197, 205-7 

Tories, distrust of 
classes by, 207 

Torrens, R., 3 

Townsend, Rev. J., 313 

Trade, flourishing of, under re- 
ligious tolerance, 10, 197, 205-7; 
free exercise of, 179; foreign, 
increase in, 136, 176; balance of, 
247, 250 

Trade unionism, 26, 203 

Traders, medieval attitude to, 17-8, 
23, 32, 33-6, 37, 104; relations 
between craftsmen and, 26, 136, 
137, 173)-°230,26320 3, sanctifica= 
tion of occupation of, 34, 104-5, 
108, 100, I10, III, 115, 199, 20f, 
230, 234, 239-53, 254, 273; frauds 
and extortion of, 50, 105, I109, 
126, 142, 153, 155-6, 208-9, 307; 
Luther’s attitude to, 92; growth 
of power of, 136, 137; purchase 
of land by, 140, 208; break-down 
of State control of, 179, 236. 
See also Bargaining, Prices, 
Profits 

Travers, W., 213 

Troeltsch, Prof., 91, 212, 316 


commercial 


336 

Tucker; Dean, . 11, 197 
(quoted), 314 

Tudors, social policy of, 164-70, 
235, 202-3, 266, 270 

Turgot, 293 

Turks, 68, 69 

Tyndale, 308, 323 

Tyrol, 68, 75, 79 


Udall bars 

Ulm, 85 

Unwin, Prof., 173 

Usher, R. G., 202 

Usury, controversy on, 9, 81, 82, 
151-64, 178, 180-3; teaching of 
medieval Church on, 17, 36-9, 
42-55; practicing of, on a large 
scale, in Middle Ages, 29, 44-5, 
176; restitution of profits of, 
30, 46, 47, 49; enforcement of 
prohibition of, 37, 45-53, 100, 
IIQ, 121, 123, 127, 160-2, 164, 
169, 187, 237, 238, 297, 298, 310; 
prevalence of, 30, I5I-2; popu- 
lar denunciations of, 30, 81, 138, 
144, 152; annuities, compensa- 
tion for loss, profits of partner- 
ship and rent-charges not re- 
garded as, 42, 43, 95, 182, 216-7, 
295; ecclesiastical legislation as 
to, 46, 52, 55; devices for con- 
cealment #0f,°.47, 140). 53s 207i, 
secular legislation as to, 52, 153, 
159, 180, 187; attitude of re- 
formers to, in Germany, 81, 83, 
04, 95, 100; in Switzerland, 81, 
83, 103-4, 105-8, 117, 119-24, 181, 
215, 216; in France, 126, 306; 
meaning of term, 152-3, 160-1, 
, 183; disappears from episcopal 
charges, 191; Puritan attitude 
to, 200, 213, 215-7, 218, 223, 225, 
232-3, 230, 246, 252, 269, 318, 
319, 320. See also Clergy, In- 
terest, Loans 

Utilitarianism, 243, 271 

Utrecht, University of, 238 


192, 


Vagrancy, measures for suppres- 
sion of, 92, 168, 217, 262, 263, 


265, 260-70, 271; increase of, 
263, 265. See also Almsgiving 
and Poor 


Value, theories of, 36, 40 
Venezuela, 79 
Venice, 68, 70, 73, 75, 87, 120, 316 


INDEX 


Vienne, Council of, 46 

Villeinage. See Serfdom 

Virtues, economic, applauding of, 
by Calvinists and Puritans, 105, 
I10, III, 114-5, 227-54, 271-2, 
273 

Vitry, Jacques de, 302 

Vives, 114, 262 

Voltaire, 208 


Wadsworth, A. P., 322 . 
Wage-earners, small number of, 
26, 38, 137, 151, 207, 268, 292; 
organizations of, 26; attitude of 
economists to, 268-70. See aiso 
Wages 
Wages, withholding of, 50, 223, 
298; regulation of, 128, 173, 174, 
235, 236, 293, 320; payment of, 
in truck, 153, 174, 236; eco- 
nomists’ views on the subject of, 
268-70, 271. See also Wage- 
earners 
Wallas, Graham, 12 
Wamba, 90 
Warburton, 192 
Ward, Sir Patience, 252 
Warwick, Earl of, 145 
Warwickshire, 138, 323 
Washerne, 140 
Wealth. See 
Riches 
Weber, Max, 212, 316-7, 319, 321 
Welsers, the, 78-9, 88, 303 
Wentworth, 174 
Wesley, 190 
Westminster Assembly, 


Production and 


10, 214, 
218 
Whalley, ecclesiastical court of, 


53 

Whalley, Major-General, 259, 323 

Whigs, 203, 252 

Whitby, Abbey, 140 

Whole Duty of Man, The, 191 

Widows and orphans, usury for 
benefit of, 182, 233 

Wilcox, Thomas, 161 

Williams, Roger, 128 

Wilson, Thomas, 156, 157, 160, 179, 
234, 319 

Wiltshire, 218, 237 

Winstanley, Gerrard, 113 (quoted), 


256 
Witt, John de, 206 
Wolsey, 138, 147 
Wood, H. G., 318 


INDEX 


By scstow, Rev. Robert, quoted, 

23 

Woollen industry. See Cloth in- 
dustry 

Worcester, Priory of, 42 

Workhouses, 265, 270, 271, 324 

Works, good, 98, I09, III, 239, 
242, 266, 320 

Wyclif, 18, 25 (quoted), 27, 39 
(quoted), 40, 293 


337 


Yarranton, A., 253 
Yeomanry, 58, 202 

York, Province of, 161, 169 
Yorke, Sir John, 140 
Yorkshire, 141, 162, 204 
Young, Arthur, 270 
Younge, R., quoted, 267 


ZULICU ATOZ, TAS 117 
Zwingli, 82, 103, 114-5, I17 





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